


The Western Road

by Teyke



Series: The Undone Universe [8]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alien Worlds, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chinese folklore, Gen, Journey to the West - Freeform, Suicide, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-13 00:37:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 136,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1206373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/pseuds/Teyke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Tony go on an epic road trip to save the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Late Return

**Author's Note:**

> This story probably isn’t going to make much sense if you haven’t read the others in the series first.
> 
> I drew heavily upon _Journey to the West_ by Wu Cheng’en, using Arthur Waley’s translation as my primary source. I’m not going to use that fandom's tag, however, because it’s so far AU from JttW that I don’t think anyone interested in that fandom would be happy to think they had a new fic for it and then find out that it’s this one. 
> 
> I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Cyphomandra - for this story, for this series, and teaching me so much about writing in general. Words cannot convey it. I also owe innumerable thanks to V, not just for beta-reading, but also for being willing to listen to me natter on about this for hours and toss back great ideas to me. Thank you to you both.
> 
> 05/28/16: [Kurukami](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami) created an awesome [playlist](http://8tracks.com/kurukami/the-undone-universe-iv-the-western-road) for this one too, with the track list available [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5301446/comments/62455318)!

The first indication that the mission was going to go FUBAR had actually been back on the Helicarrier, when the SHIELD technician had said, “Now, when you fire it on wide-beam, it tends to vibrate too strongly for most people to hang onto, but someone with superhuman strength – uh, such as yourself – should have no problem. You just need to have a firm grip,” while in the background, Clint doubled over laughing. 

The second indication had been when the technician, and the technician’s superior, and _his_ superior, had all agreed that a test-firing was out of the question, because, “Well, in previous tests after it’s fired once it tends to need some maintenance before it’s good to go again,” which had made Clint – nearly recovered – lose it all over again.

So the fact that Steve was currently fucked, and not in any of the ways that had set Clint off laughing, was not actually a surprise – but when he had a super-zombie about point-one second away from ripping his head off, that was not any sort of consolation.

The guy – who looked like he was in his fifties, getting on in years – came at him in a near-blur as Steve dived out of the way, slipping on the ice coating the ground. Fortunately for his skull, the super-zombie _also_ slipped. The entire hillside in every direction northward (and somewhat southward) resembled an oddly sculpted ice-rink: though the vibrations had made it damn near impossible to _aim_ the unimaginatively named ‘Ice Ray-Gun’ on wide-beam (the ray-gun itself had vibrated to pieces a second ago) enough to catch the super-zombie, the visible effects that it had had were nonetheless pretty... chilling.

“Abort, abort!” Steve yelled into his comm. as he took off running; as soon as the super-zombie regained his footing he’d be about and catching up faster than Steve could hope to run, but every second of distance bought counted. “Target is live and hot, I need backup – ”

Backup, these days, meant the Hulk.

Steve tried not to feel too resentful of Thor about that. Or of Tony. Right now, though, there was no time to think about it at all; he was already pivoting, skidding on the ice as he did so, instinct telling him that the attack was coming – _now_.

Flames hit the shield, melting the ice around him as he went to one knee, ducking to hide entirely behind it. The next moment he launched himself forward and up, and slammed shield-first into something heading towards him with a velocity about equal to that of a bullet train. The shield, mighty equalizer that it was, brought them both to a standstill, and while the super-zombie was still processing that fact Steve got his footing in the muddy hillside and heaved, launching the zombie upward and back down the hill. Thank the Lord that at least they couldn’t fly – Steve dove out of the way of another blast of fire and jogged backward.

The zombie spit against the ground, acid-green spit that made the mud bubble, and growled with two distinct voices, “You defy us? We will _consume_ you.”

“Mister, better than you have tried,” Steve snapped back, but his heart wasn’t in it.

At the end of the day, this guy wasn’t his enemy. He was just another victim.

The zombie rushed forward.

The first time Steve had gone up against a super-zombie, he’d gotten his ass handed to him; but then he’d been weak from hunger and nearly becoming a zombie himself. He was still nowhere near fast enough to keep up to _this_ zombie, but he had the shield on guard, and it took the full force of the first few blows – as though the zombie couldn’t believe that it could withstand the hits. That was fine by Steve; it was when the zombie gave up trying to _hit_ it and started grabbing at it, instead, to try to pull it away, that he was going to get into trouble – and it didn’t take longer than five clumsy but super-strength punches. Steve twisted under and to the side, kicking out the creature’s knee long enough to get it down, get it off him, so he could back-off and resume guard. It had no real sense of how to fight – just pure brute strength, speed, and – he ducked behind his shield again – the ability to breathe fire. And spit acid.

But that didn’t mean it couldn’t _learn._ The knee slid back into place almost immediately, crackling like a log in a stove, and the zombie lunged. Steve brought the shield down, but wasn’t fast enough compared to the extremis-enhanced speed. Instead of blocking he only managed to slice into the creature’s arm, but that healed immediately, _around_ the shield. He pushed to the side, the zombie grabbed the top edge with its other hand, and Steve’s much better leverage and positioning lost to alien-and-Stark-built nanotechnology: the shield went flying, and a moment later Steve went flying too, all the wind knocked out of him by a blow that would have pulverized any other guy – one without the serum, and without the best body armour SHIELD could put out.

He was plucked out of mid-air at a punishing speed, the roar hitting him only a moment before the iron grip of the War Machine dragged him up, _up_. Below them, the super-zombie screeched and leapt – but although it could equal their height, it had no real manoeuvrability in the air, and Rhodey evaded easily.

“My shield,” Steve gasped, the moment he could breathe. They were _far_ up, now, hiding in the low clouds.

 _“We’ll get it when Hulk’s done with him,”_ Rhodey replied shortly.

Steve couldn’t argue with that. Didn’t mean he couldn’t argue with Rhodey, though. “What’re you doing out here?” His voice was breathy; the height was making it harder than it ought to have been to get his wind back. Or maybe the zombie had hit him harder than he’d thought. “You’re supposed to be in Asia.” The western edge of it, sure, but that was still far enough that Rhodey had to have been on his way before Steve had even left the Helicarrier.

 _“Yeah, well, a half-hour ago I heard my team lead had gone all suicidal,”_ Rhodey bit back, his voice colder than the frigid clouds surrounding them.

Son of a – “You heard wrong.” He made his voice flat – flat, and nothing more. Rhodey _was_ wrong, but if he’d gotten _this_ idea into his head – damn it. He’d thought Rhodey trusted him. They worked well together.

 _“Really, man?”_ Rhodey demanded. _“Banner was three minutes out when you put out that mayday – you lasted less than a minute. You wanna tell me what the hell – ”_

“You _grabbed_ me after less than a minute,” Steve snapped, and then barely bit down on a snarl of frustration – against himself. Arguing about this was worse than useless. “I know what I’m – ”

 _“I’m not having this conversation with you while we’re a couple thousand feet up and you can’t fly, Captain,”_ Rhodey interrupted.

Steve stamped on the urge to growl, ‘Retired.’ Even the people at SHIELD who thought he was crazy still called him Captain.

And that was pretty much everybody.

 

 

 

 

“You were _told_ it couldn’t be used continuously,” Dr. Martell said, her voice hitting a tone of complaint just short of whining. “Three short bursts – _two_ , ideally!”

“It was vibrating all over the place,” Steve said evenly. “Even Hawkeye couldn’t have hit that thing with it.” He tried not to feel too much irritation at Martell – like everyone else in her division, she’d been working long, exhausting hours for the past three months, and it showed in every line on her face, in the long bags under her eyes.

“The moisture content of the air...” suggested Dr. Belgrade.

“We worked that problem out.”

“But with the pressure changes from transport – ”

Fury cut off the scientists before they could really get into the argument. “Gentlemen. Ladies. I expect you’ll want to continue work on the prototypes – _immediately_. I don’t have to remind you of the time limits we’re facing.”

“Sir,” Martell said, shoving her chair back and leaving. The others quickly followed suit, leaving Steve the only one sitting at the table – Fury never seemed to actually sit down anywhere.

“You’re sure Agent Barton couldn’t have managed that shot?” Fury asked after a moment.

“Positive, sir.” And not just because Clint would need a mount to handle it; the gun weighed a good three hundred pounds. Otherwise, the mission would have _been_ Clint’s, for all that it was really less a ‘gun’ and more a directed bomb. If Engineering hadn’t been split sixty-forty on whether they’d be able to integrate it with the War Machine without compromising the suit, Rhodey would have been SHIELD’s second choice for today’s test-run.

The freeze-bomb wasn’t a final solution – that, SHIELD was still working on, although it seemed more hopeless with every day that went by with no further progress on tracking down Borjigin and Hansen. Both Steve and Rhodey had retrieved extremis samples from across Asia, but so far the stuff adapted to whatever ‘anti-virus’ code the techs cooked up to throw at it, and twice it had become so much more lethal in the process that they’d nearly lost containment.

A month ago, they _had_ lost containment, and a good thirty-three people with it. Since then, progress on that front had slowed to a crawl.

Shapanka’s wrist-blaster freeze-ray was only good if they could actually nail the zombies with it: easy enough when it came to the regular ones, but extremis gave the enhanced such good reflexes that they could see the beam coming at them and avoid it easily. Larger setups, though, increased massively in size and _decreased_ massively in portability, making them worthless at hunting down fast-moving, tiny targets; today’s test-run had been the first real ‘portable’ prototype that had even had a chance at working. Conventional weaponry was next to useless against them: unless it was a direct hit (and even sometimes if it was) they healed immediately, and they could dodge almost anything, unless they had a reason to stick around. A target.

Hence, the Hulk. But the Hulk, though he’d given it a few good shots, couldn’t smash all of them, and was becoming more and more reluctant to smash _any_ of them. Slowly, but surely, the idea that these people were innocent, that they’d been taken over by something else, had worked its way into Hulk’s brain. And he didn’t like it any more than the rest of them did.

Fury stared at Steve a moment longer, like he was contemplating something – or maybe he was just trying to make Steve squirm. It wasn’t, Steve thought morosely, something he needed encouragement to do, not when he knew that Bruce was in for another night of sedation, lest he Hulk out from screaming nightmares about squishing heads in his fists. It was Clint’s turn on Hulk-watch tonight, fortunately, though if Steve didn’t think he’d only be a reminder of the day’s work, he’d have ensconced himself in the chair outside Bruce’s room anyway.

Finally, Fury nodded. “Dismissed.”

“Sir.”

Outside in the hallways, agents let their eyes slide past him; Steve ignored them and tried not to feel too alone. His team had other assignments – Rhodey hadn’t even fully landed on the Helicarrier, just dropped Steve to the deck and then taken off; Natasha was still in France; and Clint was spotting for Bruce, or rather, the Hulk. He couldn’t begrudge any of them for not being there, especially not when Fury’s only comment about Rhodey’s intervention had been a mild, “He made good time,” and an assurance that retroactive orders were being issued to cover any appearance of disobedience.  

Fury was willing to believe Steve’s whole story about alternate worlds and dimensions, even though he knew that Steve wasn’t telling him everything. Steve wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn that trust, but if even Fury thought that Steve had been an idiot in planning this mission...

 _You should talk to your shrink, Rogers,_ he told himself. It sounded like a mix of Fury and Tony in his head.

He should _not_ punch the wall, so he made himself relax his fists, and then he headed for the hanger and the chance that someone might be flying back to New York in the next few hours.

 

 

 

 

The drab brown walls of his apartment were a dismal ‘welcome back’. Two months, and he still hadn’t gotten around to putting up any pictures or paintings. But every time he thought about it, there was the niggling feeling that if he started trying to make the apartment _feel_ like home, it actually would _become_ home – permanently.

A month ago Tony’s – the other Tony’s – remains had disappeared from his coffin, which had gotten Dr. Foster excited, although when Tony failed to show up in his place everyone else had stopped caring. Two and a half months ago, Tony had sworn he’d be right behind Steve. _Something_ had happened – but Tony would find a way. Or Anthony would finally show up, and solve everything with a snap of his fingers. Or maybe SHIELD would move portal research off the backburner. _Something_.

When he didn’t want to dwell on the reasons why these might become his long-term accommodations, Steve told himself it didn’t matter because he spent so little time here anyway. Half the nights he bunked with Bruce; most of the days he spent training on the Helicarrier or on solo missions into zombiefied territory, scouting and gathering samples that others couldn’t, not with any relative degree of safety. Really, this place was just a spot to crash and sleep occasionally. For all that it was located in Brooklyn, it would never be home. Not like his apartment with Bucky had been, and not Stark Tower had been.

The locks clicked shut behind him automatically, and Steve shucked his shield and bag onto the living room table before wandering into the kitchen to grab something to eat. In the old days JARVIS would have kept the fridge ready with gourmet meals; now, if he wanted something like that, he had to buy it and cook it himself, but SHIELD did do him the favour of keeping the freezer fully stocked with ready-to-microwave meals. His throat closed up for a moment at the thought of JARVIS – and then he breathed through his nose, and put the thought out of his mind.

His tablet lay where he’d abandoned it this morning on the counter; he thumbed it on, and the NYT article he’d barely started reading popped up immediately.

 

_Monday, February 17th, 2014  
STARK TOWER GOES DARK_

_Last night, at 3:42 AM, the lights on New York City’s tallest building went out. Its arc reactor – the revolutionary, ultra-secret technology that the late Tony Stark had claimed would change the world forever – has run out, three months before its projected deadline._

_“The building has already been reconnected to the city’s power grid,” lead federal investigator James Gallaghan said this morning in a brief press conference. “The arc reactor was designed to power the Tower for a year. In the days after the Chintauri Invasion, Stark Industries provided power to nearly half the city. They were aware that this would shorten the lifespan of the reactor accordingly and disclosed this information to us at the outset of this investigation.”_

_But the windows on most floors of Stark Tower remain dark. Stark Industries, once a corporate titan, is no longer listed on any stock exchange. An estimated 99.8% of its assets have been frozen or seized by governments both foreign and domestic. Nearly six hundred thousand former SI employees are currently looking for work – but no one is eager to hire anyone who worked for the creators of the nanoplague. No one is eager to occupy the levels of Stark Tower, either. The Avengers, Stark’s burgeoning team of superheroes who came together to save the city nine months ago, relocated just before Christmas; the last sub-letting office, Dyson Printing Inc, moved out last Thursday. The only remaining ‘tenants’ are Gallaghan and his army of investigators, who are still combing the former NY corporate headquarters for any clue that might shine light on how or why the nanoplague was created – and how it can be stopped._

_It’s an investigation that has come increasingly under fire from the international community as the nanoplague’s death toll rises. The cover-up of Stark’s suicide was orchestrated by a US government agency; the first outbreak didn’t occur until days after his death. While SHIELD claims the creation of the nanoplague was solely the work of now-internationally-wanted terrorists Tem Borjigin and Maya Hansen, there is no denying that its development took place within SI facilities. Leaked reports from within the agency have pointed to Stark funding the project personally._

_The public pressure is beginning to add up. A recent NYT survey showed that 74% of responders believed Stark must have had a greater role in the development of the technological virus than SHIELD is willing to admit. 36% went further, agreeing with the opinion that Stark’s still-unconfirmed suicide was related to the nanoplague. For experienced political watchers, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Meetings on..._

 

There was a knock at his door.

Steve stood and carried the tablet back into the living room where his shield was, switching the screen over to bring up his apartment’s security cameras instead. If a reporter had managed to get past the outer security again – but, no.

The man waving unerringly at the hidden camera was tall, maybe only an inch shorter than Steve, mid-twenties – though the backpack he was wearing made him seem younger – blond, clean-shaven. He didn’t _seem_ to have a camera or mic – but then, if he was familiar enough with stealth surveillance tech to locate the one hidden over Steve’s door, the lack of an obvious camera didn’t mean anything. There was something about him that seemed familiar – something that was pinging alarm bells in Steve’s brain. He gave the guy another once-over: sneakers, cargo-pants, sporty jacket – nothing that stood out –

Blond, clean-shaven – but his skin didn’t really match the _shade_ of blond –

Steve’s brain helpfully imposed a goatee over his visitor’s face, and he dropped the tablet back onto the table. “Son of a gun.”

Another knock. How had he gotten past the front door? How the _hell_ was SHIELD not picking this up? No, those were stupid questions. Steve grabbed his shield and threw open the door, tugging the guy inside quickly and letting the door fall shut.

“Steve!” Tony – _a_ Tony – said, smiling brightly.

“What reality are you from?” he demanded. “And why are you here?”

The Tony’s face fell, and his eyes slid off to the side. “Uh, well – okay, I deserved that.”

“What?”

His eyes flicked back up to meet Steve’s. They didn’t match his hair either – too dark by far. This close, Steve could see the faintest beginnings of dark roots beneath a dye job that would have made Natasha frown with professional disapproval. “Um. I’m... from this reality.”

Steve stared at him.

“Hi?” Tony offered, smiling weakly.

“You – ” Steve set his shield down and glared at him. “You complete – _bastard_.”

“Surprise?” Tony sighed, and lost the smile. “If I could have told you earlier – ” he raised his hands, as if in defense, and then dropped them again, back to his sides. “But I didn’t think – ”

He broke off with a not-quite squawk when Steve stepped forward and pulled him into a hug. “You idiot,” Steve growled at him after a long moment. He couldn’t quite bring himself to let go just yet. Tony was _alive_ – real, solid, warm. Living. _Blond_ , for some reason. “You – _bastard_.”

“I – um,” Tony mumbled into his shoulder. He’d tensed up when Steve had hugged him, but now he was slowly relaxing. “I couldn’t tell you earlier. It took me a while to – uh, to get back – ”

“You _lied_ ,” Steve stepped back, releasing Tony from the hug, although he kept a grip on his upper arms. He couldn’t quite bring himself to let Tony out of reach just yet. “You said you’d be right behind me – ”

“I was supposed to be!” Tony protested. “But the ring portal – broke, and then I had to use the one I cooked up for you – ”

“You said you’d be _right behind me_ ,” Steve said again, resisting the urge to shake him. “I spent four hours watching a corpse and half-thinking it was _you_ , damn it – most of SHIELD thinks I’ve completely lost it, and you – you’re – ” He stared at Tony, not knowing how to put in to words everything in the last two and a half months, grief and worry and fear – “You’re _blond!”_

“Yeah, I dyed it,” Tony said, seizing upon the new topic eagerly. He raised one hand to push half-heartedly at Steve’s hand and, equally reluctantly, Steve dropped that one back to his side. He kept the other hand on Tony’s arm. “It makes me look like an idiot,” truer words had never been spoken, in Steve’s opinion, “but I think we already proved pretty conclusively that shaving is an insufficient disguise – ”

“The growing four inches and losing twenty years helps,” Steve deadpanned. Humour, because he hadn’t the first clue what to think of it – and because the relief was making him feel giddy.

What in God’s name had happened to him?

Tony’s face crinkled with indignation. “ _Ten_ years – ”

Steve rolled his eyes.

“ _Fifteen_ years – ” Tony amended, still so full of bullshit, and Steve grabbed him and hugged him again. “ – and glad to see you too – need to breathe, breathing, Cap, s’good idea – ”

“I thought you were _dead_ ,” Steve mumbled, and he felt/heard Tony sigh before the other man brought up his arms to hug Steve back. “ _Again_.”

“I’m not sorry,” Tony said, half-hearted and tired. “It was for the best.”

The words felt like a punch in the gut. Steve let him go and backed off, retreating around the table. _How_ could Tony think that? What the hell had he been doing? “How are you – what happened?” he asked instead. “Magic? Some sort of spell? Did Anthony come back?”

“Ah – no, no, and no,” Tony said, his eyes sliding to the side again. Oh, Lord. How bad was it if Tony wasn’t even _trying_ to lie about it properly? “Which I’m sort of worried about – I did eventually manage to get a ring portal active, obviously – go me, fixed that problem, but it took a while to rebuild and I thought he’d get to it sooner – ”

“Tony,” Steve cut him off. “What happened?”

Tony didn’t reply – not verbally. But his gaze flicked over to the tablet, still lying on the table; Steve followed his glance, and watched as – apparently of its own volition – the screen turned on and the security program flipped back to the newspaper article he’d been reading.

_...Today marks the twelve-week anniversary of the release of the nanoplague. According to estimates from the WHO, nearly 90-million people have been infected; more than half of those are now dead. But the total indirect death toll is even higher. As countries close their borders and put up armed guards, international trade and travel has ground to a halt. Aid to quake victims in Southeast Asia has ceased almost entirely, with shipments of food, building, and medical supplies backed up at international borders. Refugee camps in the Middle East make tempting targets for the so-called ‘super-zombies’..._

What? And also – what? How was Tony controlling the tablet? JARVIS? Steve felt his heart give a lurch of hope at the thought.

The article scrolled down, and then clicked over to the next page – and then the next. The words stood out from the screen: _...hidden funding beneath Stark Medical, leading to some speculation that the purpose wasn’t to create super-soldiers. Dr. Elizabeth Dean, professor at the University of Philadelphia, is one of those who thinks that extremis’ original purpose was non-military. “The unique thing about it isn’t that it makes its victims mindless – plenty of conventional drugs can do that. But the astonishing healing factor – ”_

Oh, no. Healing factor? Tony had lost two decades and grown whole inches.

Healing factor. Human _enhancement_.

“No,” Steve said. “You didn’t.” He _couldn’t_ have, could he? Extremis didn’t _work_ – that was the entire problem, it was broken, it turned people into _zombies_ –

“In my defense,” Tony raised his hands, a half-hearted attempt to placate, “I was dying, or – close enough to it, anyway.”

Steve stared at him.

“I got – attacked.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and stared back at Steve mulishly. “It was your idea?”

“ _What_?” That came rather closer to a shout than Steve had intended. “It was _not –_ ”

“Well, okay, I could have been hallucinating that, like I said, I was _dying_ – ”

“Who attacked you?” Who had been _left_? Had ULTRON come back to life somehow? Had Natasha betrayed them? He quashed _that_ thought immediately. He hadn’t been wrong about her – he _hadn’t_.

“Somebody from that reality, nobody you’ve... met,” Tony said, but he was obviously hedging. He met Steve’s eyes and smiled ruefully. “It’s complicated – more complicated than I told you. I... couldn’t say everything, not then. I still can’t. Somebody might hear – I’ll tell you about that, though, too, because,” he picked up the tablet triumphantly, “I can write it out, and we can go over this on the way. I’d like to get going – we’re wasting time.”

“Time before what?” Why _was_ he here? After months of letting Steve think he was dead – of letting _everybody_ think he was dead?

“I infected myself with extremis,” Tony said bluntly, meeting Steve’s eyes challengingly. Whatever he thought he was going to see there – Steve didn’t know, but Tony looked away, down at the tablet instead. He switched over from the news to the interior cameras – SHIELD was honest about placing them, at least, even if Steve hated them. Tony even bothered to tap the controls with his fingers, this time.

“For some reason, I didn’t go crazy,” Tony continued, now quiet. “I didn’t get the, uh, full superpowers, either. I mean, I tried, I was dying anyway, I figured, why not grow three inches _and_ run faster than sound? – but whenever I reach too far, it starts... getting loud, in my head.” He shuddered, and it looked like an unconscious motion.

“You infected yourself with extremis,” Steve said flatly. It was a stupid thing, echoing Tony like a parrot, but it was say it or go over and bang his head against the wall until Tony’s actions started making sense. Who, even while dying, thought the answer lay in zombie-hood?

“But I’m not a zombie.”

“I can see that!”

“When I figured out I could, I recoded parts of it,” Tony explained, hurrying a bit more now, “While it was recoding me, so it was kinda a rush job. Some... I couldn’t. I firewalled it off – there’s these linkups out there, it’s a hive-mind – something I _never_ designed. I’ve been trying to hack into it, see if I could gain control of the network and make it _stop_ , but I go too close and it becomes hard to think.” He grimaced.

“And it’s getting worse?” Steve extrapolated, even more alarmed. With the rate the nanoplague was spreading –

“What? No,” Tony said, apparently startled that it was even a consideration. “I told you, firewalls. That’s not the point - every minute, more people are becoming infected, more people are dying. I’ve tried to stop it.” His expression, for all that he was obviously struggling for composure, was one of muted anguish – and then, like a switch had been flicked, that composure was achieved and his voice became calm, earnest. “Please believe me, Steve, I have _tried_. But this tech – it’s beyond me. I hate to admit it – Jesus Christ, I hate it – but it is. There’s too much I don’t understand of it, too much weirdness that Borjigin tossed in – you could even say _alien_ ness.” He raised his eyebrows significantly.  

“You have a plan,” Steve said, because he had to – it was Tony, after all. And he was _here_.

“Maklu owes Earth wergild – I propose we ask them for the cure. I’ve built a portal that can take us there. I want you to come with me.” His gaze was frank, direct. “Promised you I wouldn’t do this alone.”

Steve rolled his eyes, and, stubbornly, took a seat at the table. “Why not involve SHIELD?” Because that was a damn thin line for Tony to be treading, after six months of being admittedly hallucinating and paranoid, and another ten weeks of _nothing_.

“Bigger organizations, bigger risks – come on, you know that _he_ has his fingers inside it, I know you know that – I read the reports, Steve. And I read _your_ report, too – you never told me that part where you went and chatted up the Chief Magistrate – ”

“You could go directly to Fury. He’d keep it small, within the team – ”

“What, and give Fury the perfect scapegoat? Waste six months trying to prove my self from an alternate reality was the one who fucked us over?” Tony snapped. Steve narrowed his eyes; the other Tony might have triggered the Skynet Protocol, but it had been _Tony_ who had hired Hansen and Borjigin... and who had regained the memories that had driven him crazy shortly before Steve had last seen him. He’d said that it would be fine, but how far could Steve trust that? “Not worth it. Bruce is a problem – I can’t shield him, he’s a... beacon,” Tony said, fumbling for the word. “He stands out, and everybody nearby him stands out. So. I take you, that leaves Clint and Natasha to stay here – you know they work best as a team.”

“Rhodey – ”

“ – is about one step away from being court-martialled and today’s stunt didn’t help things. He’s too close to me.” Guilt, in his voice and in his eyes. “There’re too many people who want to take the armour away from him and I’m _not_ going to be the reason they strip his rank trying.”

“Thor could – ”

“ _Names_ ,” said Tony, and it was half a snarl, although his expression was completely, perfectly controlled.

Steve frowned at him, searching his face for some kind of break or clue. “You said - and _Anthony_ said - it was like... calling them, right? He’s an ally, even if he isn’t... here.”

Tony waggled his hand it from side to side, easy-going again. Normal. Frankly, kinda freaking Steve out. “Yes, sort of, though you’re jumping the gun, I was worried about, well, nevermind. Call their name and they get a ring, fine, let’s go with that. Ally, though – not so much.” There _was_ something off about his expression, a kind of brittle blankness that made Steve reach for his shield so he could run his fingers along the edge of it. “So. Not him. I’ll explain on the way.” The whatever-it-was in his expression smoothed out again with the return to the topic of leaving.

“You’re in a hurry.”

“Steve.” Now it was Tony’s turn to frown at him – though, being Tony, he frowned by raising an eyebrow. “If somebody in Maklu can explain a couple key points about their tech, we could shut down extremis _tomorrow._ That’s anywhere between fifty thousand to ten _million_ lives saved.”

That was... a very good point. Steve fought against the shame that washed over him – he still had valid reasons to object. “So it’s just you and me, off to demand a favour from aliens on the behalf of Earth? We don’t have that kind of authority, Tony.”

“You want to leave this up to _bureaucracy?”_ Tony said incredulously. “Steve, there is _no time_ \- ”

“There _was_ time, these last two months there was time!” Steve said, planting his palm on the table and leaning toward him. “You could have contacted us at any point – ”

“That would have wasted time with – ”

“That’s a damn poor excuse, and you know it! You walked in here without being seen, don’t tell me you couldn’t have contacted SHIELD without handing yourself over! You could have kept us in the loop – we could have had this conversation two months ago!” He was standing, he realized – the chair was lying on the ground behind him, tipped over. He hadn’t realized he’d stood – he grit his teeth, and this time it was directed at himself. He needed to get his temper under control. “You told me,” he said, taking care to keep his voice even, “You _promised_ me you wouldn’t keep trying to do this alone.”

“I’m _here_ , aren’t I?” Tony shot back, almost petulantly, and he immediately made a face, apparently realizing how childish he sounded. “SHIELD is compromised, Steve. I couldn’t even trust the EMR shielding I had, because they took it and _he_ took it from them, he’s been toying with them – so who knows if he figured out how to get around it? _This_ is new stuff,” he waved a hand about, as if to indicate the invisible shield present. “Not to mention all the other – look, that’s not important. SHIELD has no reason to trust me and every reason to get in my way, and this is too important for that.”

“Pride goeth, Tony,” Steve said tightly.

Tony let one corner of his mouth quirk up in a small, sad smile. “I know. Will you come?”

Steve sighed. “Of course I’m coming. Let me pack.”

“Don’t bother with the suit, I’ve got a better one for you,” Tony ordered, doing an abrupt one-eighty from muted disappointment to looking as pleased as a cat. He leaned – more _lounged,_ really – against the back of a chair, tapping his fingers rapid-fire on the wood. “Saw your fight earlier – that was ridiculous, you shouldn’t have to worry about fire.”

That left – not a lot to take. He grabbed his coat and shoes, a water-bottle and some snacks – which he tossed at Tony; if he was going to impersonate a college student by carrying around a backpack then they might as well make use of it. Tony, though, didn’t put them away, just stood there holding them with a bemused expression.

“I have to leave something for SHIELD,” Steve said, going over to hunt around in the drawer for a pen and pad of paper. “They thought I was crazy the last time I came back.”

“I can write one in...”

“And then you’ll have to tell them you were here,” Steve pointed out. Left unsaid was the question of whether or not Tony _would_ actually tell them, even now.

He clicked the pen and scribbled down, _Gone to Maklu to get help with extremis. Please water my plant. Not sure when I’ll be back._ Tony – not to mention JARVIS – might be able to hack any electronic device he set his mind to, but paper would hopefully be harder.  

“I hope you have a flying car,” Steve muttered, checking the exterior cameras on the tablet. There were only three news teams camped outside today – when he’d first moved in, there’d been thirty, and after the one time he’d made the mistake of leaving by the front door, it had briefly increased to something that felt like three hundred. These days, he got SHIELD to drop him off on the roof – it wasn’t as if he ever went anywhere except where SHIELD pointed him. He’d have felt sorry for his neighbours, except that they were all SHIELD agents, too, and half of them were probably tasked with keeping an eye on him during their downtime. He felt sorrier for the news crews, really – it was pretty clear that none of them actually wanted to be there, standing out on his doorstep in mid-February weather. In the beginning, sure, there’d been some keeners; by now those remaining were low-level reporters assigned the crap job by the higher-ups. But that didn’t mean he wanted to make their day by walking out his front door where they could get a shot at him.

Tony rolled his eyes. “If I had a flying car I’d have showed it to you months ago.”

True, Steve had to admit. “I’m gonna get mobbed as soon as I leave.”

“Nope.” Tony grinned, and strolled out the door, calling from the hallway, “Come on, Cap! Let me show you some _science_.”

Steve eyed the door, then the paper – still there, still with words on it – and followed him out, letting the locks click home behind him. Tony, looking as energetic as... well, as energetic as Tony in his twenties must have been... practically _bounced_ into the emergency stairwell and down the stairs. Steve had a sudden bad feeling about this – or a worse feeling, at least. When they got to the bottom, Tony held out his hand, wiggling his fingers in invitation. “You’ll love this.”

Steve raised an eyebrow, but took his hand; Tony interlaced their fingers, like they were teenagers out on a date, and Steve rolled his eyes. “ _Science?_ ” he asked pointedly.

“Yup,” said Tony, and the world grew... _brighter_.

No, thought Steve, looking at the shockingly vivid blond of Tony’s hair – the brilliant scarlet lining of his jacket, no longer muted – the deep chocolate-mahogany of his eyes – it wasn’t _brighter_. But all the colours were suddenly _vivid_ like they’d never been before, and in that moment he wished more than anything that he had pastels with him and a blank canvas, so he could try to capture even a tenth of what he was seeing. His breath caught, stolen by the world’s new beauty.

“Invisibility cloak,” Tony said smugly. “I upgraded it, too – it’s covering both of us, at the moment. When we get near the door I’ll include it, too, so it’ll look like it stayed shut – no mysteriously opening doors.”

“This is amazing,” Steve marvelled, looking down at him himself. His own skin was pale, was rosy, was practically glowing; the blue fabric of his jacket was like the sky on a cloudless day, out in the middle of the wide-open Midwest. Even the boring stairwell walls were transformed, every shade and shadow on their imperfect surface suddenly a masterwork of art.

“Still guzzles gas like a Ford, but the aliasing was reduced by 83% on average, so I’m calling it a win,” Tony continued as he dragged them over to the door. “You good to go?”

“I want to look outside,” Steve said, feeling a smile tug at the corners of his mouth.

Outside was _brilliant_ , and not just because it was the first time since he’d moved in that Steve had been able to walk out his own front door without immediately getting mobbed; the news vans were set up outside, but the reporters stayed huddled near the doors, completely ignoring Steve and Tony as they wandered down the sidewalk. Steve barely paid them any attention at all: he was caught up in the _colours_. Had he ever seen a sky that shade of storm-grey before? The pathetic little trees planted by the sidewalk were transformed; the wrought iron grating over some windows had never been more foreboding; the rich reds and browns of the bricks had never before displayed so many hues. He almost didn’t notice when Tony came to a stop beside a small car – green, deep green, like the ancient trees in the –

Then everything faded, and Steve had to stifle a noise of protest. _Normal_ , he reminded himself – Tony had just dropped the cloak, so this was _normal_ – but compared to before it was like watching the world in grey-scale. Everything seemed less... real, somehow.

Steve shook his head. That was a dangerous thought.

“Yes, hard to believe, I know,” said Tony dryly, pulling the door open for Steve – of course, of the two of them, Tony was the less recognizable now. “But it makes up for it in that it’s inconspicuous.”

“Tony Stark, back from the dead, driving a Volvo,” Steve muttered, as he slid into the car – the seat was uncomfortably short for somebody with legs as long as his – and pulled the door shut. Tony went around to the other side, and when he’d climbed in, too, Steve finished, “Nobody’d believe it if I told ‘em.”

“It could’ve been a minivan,” Tony said, with real distaste.

“That _I_ can’t believe.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Tony agreed. “It couldn’t have been.” He pulled out onto the street without bothering with his turn signal and then almost immediately made an illegal left-turn into an alley.

Steve clutched at the door-handle. “Is this car secretly a tank?” he yelped.

“Cameras, Steve. Cameras everywhere. Seriously, nobody expects New York to give London a run for its money, but hey – things the government doesn’t tell you, huh – the point is that I don’t need to look to tell when there are cars coming. And the car has its own cameras, too, and enough of a computer that I don’t actually need have my hands on the wheel.”

“What, _cameras?_ Don’t tell me you – ”

“I told you I took extremis, Cap,” said Tony, an just a tiny bit too calmly. “And that it worked for me. I can see – lots of stuff, now. The whole of the internet – it’s a trip, it really is.” His grin didn’t reach his eyes. “Everything wireless, lots of things that aren’t – everything that’s a computer, it’s _mine_. How did you think I was controlling your tablet? I wasn’t being _subtle_ , for chrissake.”

“I _thought_ JARVISwas helping you,” Steve said, sharp, too sharp, and he had to turn his head away, immediately regretting the words – more so, at the sound of Tony’s soft intake of breath. The car careened around another corner and into traffic thick enough to force Tony to slow, at least momentarily – even if extremis had enhanced his reaction speed, there still needed to _be_ a gap to move through.

“JARVIS is dead,” Tony said quietly. “He died months ago. I could bring back a copy of him, but – he’d be a new person. New JARVIS – sibling of old JARVIS, but... new. Dead is dead. Sometimes undead.” He grit his teeth together hard enough that Steve could faintly hear them grinding.

New JARVIS. Dead is dead. The JARVIS whom they’d brought online after the other Tony had killed himself, when everything had first gone pear-shaped – had he just been a copy?

Didn’t matter, even if he was. There were a million copies of Steve running around out there, each in their own alternate world – they were still all separate people, and most importantly, they were all _people_. There was nothing about the JARVIS that would ever make any version of him _just_ a copy.

A gap in the traffic – Steve registered it, and then registered Tony accelerating a moment later, swerving and _through_ , earning himself a loud outcry as at least three other drivers leaned on their horns. Hardly keeping a low profile – Steve glanced around for cops, but of course, there weren’t any. Tony would have seen. But if there were cameras –

Okay, so that was taken care of, but if somebody phoned –

...but if somebody made an actual, _in-person_ report, then they might get noticed by somebody with the authority to do something about it. It would take a while, though – they’d be long gone by then. Assuming that they didn’t wind up in a car accident, with a car banged up so badly that they weren’t able to go _anywhere_.

“It still wouldn’t _kill you_ ,” Steve managed, “to drive with a bit of _sanity_.” He would have sworn that Tony’s driving hadn’t been this bad _before_.

Tony’s mouth twisted; his words were a bit too tight: “Don’t tell me you obeyed all the rules of the road back in Germany.”

 “Back in Germany I was trying to avoid enemy fire, not red lights. Getting in an accident isn’t going to help anything!”

Tony sighed, but he eased his foot off the gas pedal, at least, and then instead – Steve covered his eyes with one hand – leaned all the way over into the backseat, _taking his eyes off the road_ , to fish out the tablet from the backpack and toss it into Steve’s lap. It made a chiming sound of activation when it landed, and Steve turned it over to see red text on a black background reading, _Question and answer time, then._ Beneath the text was the outline of a keyboard’s keys, white-on-black.

Steve placed his fingers carefully – this type of keyboard really wasn’t meant for people with hands as large as his – and paused. There were so many questions he had to ask – where was he even supposed to begin? Well, he could start with the mundane.

He felt reluctant to bring up JARVIS again, so quickly. And what was he supposed to say about the whole damned mess, anyway?

“How long is this trip gonna be?”

“Ah,” Tony said a bit guiltily. “Well. The facility’s out in Lima.”

Steve stared. “Lima, _Peru?_ ” Why were they _driving_?

“No, Ohio.”

Okay, that was... not quite as bad, but it was still at least an eight-hour drive – probably more. Steve closed his eyes and thunked his head back against the headrest.

“The car’s got enough stealth tech on it that I can speed well above the limit,” Tony assured him, which was not actually reassuring at all.

“Why not a jet?” he asked instead, skeptically.

“Because I haven’t gotten around to stealthing one of those,” Tony shrugged. “It’s a bit more involved than a car. And it’s sort of hard to go unnoticed at the airport these days.”

That was true. Steve looked out the window as they idled in a sea of cars at a red light; an enormous electronic billboard was flashing a public health advisory, reminding citizens to _Keep Yourself Safe from the Nanovirus: 1) Avoid international travel until the crisis has passed..._ – pretty dumb advice. All non-military air travel had been shut down for months; countries had closed their borders as tight as they could go. Consumer airlines were being kept afloat by government backing, and nothing else.

But that wouldn’t have been a problem if Tony hadn’t still been keeping everything secret from SHIELD – with a quinjet, the trip would have take less than an hour. For all he’d been going on about hurrying, Tony valued secrecy more than he valued stopping extremis right _now_. Steve felt the corners of his mouth turn down at the confirmation.

 _What couldn’t you tell me back in the other world?_ he typed out. His text came out blue.

The cursor hadn’t blinked more than once before the reply appeared: _Asgardians aren’t human._

“Huh, I’d never thought of that.”

 _Ha, ha. They’re_ really _not human. They don’t exist in space and time the way we do._

Steve blinked at the tablet. That sounded... kinda crazy, even when talking about aliens. Thor had been right there – so had Loki. But more text was already appearing with explanations, so he read on: _You’ve seen alternate worlds – humans on alternate worlds, they’re just other versions of us. They’re not the same people – very similar, but we don’t have a hivemind. Asgardians do._

“What?”

 _The Nine Realms are all alternate realities of each other – sort of,_ Tony wrote, which didn’t help clear things up at _all_. _Without being... alternate alternate realities. Basically, if you took Earth and cloned it a couple of times back at the dawn of the planet and allowed for the space-time-‘magic’ differential fall-out, you’d get the Nine Realms. Then you take the Nine Realms and you clone them altogether, and you get a bunch of different alternate realities, like the one we were in._

_Then, you take all those alternate realities – let’s call them a Cluster. So you have Earth, then the Nine Realms, then a Cluster, and Clusters can be copied over and over, too. They’re all copies, just with different types of variations depending on what dimension they’re being copied along. Generalized Foster Theory holds that there’s an upper limit at the number of dimensions, and Asgardian science agrees, but a GFT says that some of those dimensions are infinite, while Asgard’s science says no, they’re all finite. Well, sort of. Thor’s explanation got kinda mystical-mumbo-jumbo at that point, I’m not sure if he didn’t get it or the SHIELD scientists interviewing him didn’t. Waste of time, really, they should have let Foster do all that questioning._

Vaguely, Steve remembered Sue Richards explaining this – but somehow, the explanation had made more sense before Tony had pitched in, when he hadn’t had to think about it too hard beyond the fact that alternate realities were somehow real. Plus, he’d been distracted with all their mentions of gods at the time.

“Um. What?”

Tony sighed. _...Think of Earth like a marble._

“Okay.”

_Although it's not just our Earth, it's our... 3D universe. The solar system, the galaxy, everything you could fly a spaceship to - it's all one marble._

“...Okay.”

_Now, there’s a bunch of other marbles all like, but they’re... I don’t know, different in size or shape, or whatever. They’re similar – they’re made out of the same stuff – but they’re... uh, different. And if you wanted to get from one marble to another you couldn't just walk around on your own marble. You'd have to, hmm, hop._

Tony was pretty bad at metaphors, Steve thought, but he nodded anyway.

_Well, you... keep marbles in a bag, right? One of those little netted things. Okay, so you’ve got a set of marbles in a bag. Those are the Nine Realms. There’s more than nine marbles, but nothing humans have ever named after numbers is accurate – look at the Hundred Year War._

“Tony.”

_Right, off-track. So you have a bag full of marbles. Now... imagine you’re a marble store. You sell lots of sets of marbles! So you have an entire stockroom full of bags of marbles – that’s the Cluster. And... if you’re a chain marble store, then you’ve got other stores elsewhere that have their own rooms full of marbles, and those are other clusters. But compared to getting between marbles within a bag, or between bags within the same room, they’re... really far away. It takes a lot of power to travel from one to another._

“Okay, I get that,” Steve said. “I don’t understand why it’s... important. It’s still – ” he caught himself, and typed, _It’s still an alternate reality._

 _Humans exist on a single world,_ Tony replied. _Your alternate reality self – he’s not you. He’s just a guy like you. But Asgardians exist over Clusters. The interaction between one world and another can be limited – but they’re all the same person. The Thor back in the reality we visited is the same as the one here – they’re different personalities, appearances... but there’s a connection between them. They’re the same person, in the end._

“How does that work?” Steve eyed the tablet, and then, realizing that was a bit ridiculous, eyed Tony in the seat next to him. “How do you even _know_ that?”

 _In every Cluster, every marble store, there's one central, prime set of Nine Realms – um, like a really expensive, rare, prized bag of marbles, the sort that marble geeks would go crazy over – where all the information from the other alternate realms within the Cluster gets... stored, sort of. Condensed. The prime-Thor there is the_ real _Thor – the one here is more like a reflection of some parts of his personality. Not all of them._

That was... hard to picture.

_The Clusters cycle based on Ragnarok. It’s another Norse myth – regrettably way truer than I’d like –_

“I read up on it,” Steve interrupted.

 _Well, it’s real. But it doesn’t just affect Asgard, or any single set of Nine Realms: it’s Cluster-wide. There are these beings – the Asgardians call them the Norns – they... determine the fate of the Cluster, I guess. Or maybe just all the Asgards within that Cluster – I’m not too sure, ever since you mentioned other gods... but, well, anyway. They control a lot of_ something _. Loki-prime from another Cluster wanted out – in his Cluster, he was fated to die at the end of Ragnarok – so he pulled me from this one. That’s when I learned this. Most of it, anyway. Some of it’s still guesswork. He needed an outside agent in order to get around the Norns’ power, since they had total control over all the rules_ within _that Cluster._

“And?”

“He succeeded, of course,” Tony said, sounding a bit annoyed. “I told you that already.”

Memory came back to him with perfect clarity: looking upon Amora with Stephen’s gem, and seeing her selves branch _out_ – across worlds, across realities, all connected, all luminous and powerful, the truth of a goddess’ soul: beyond any human comprehension. “I meant, what are you planning to do about it?” If Tony was still planning on killing Loki – _how_? Going to each world, out of who-knew how many worlds there were in such a ‘Cluster’, and killing each Loki there?

 _Cut off the head, and the body follows._ _If I kill the alternate Loki in the prime set of the Nine Realms in this Cluster, where his true self is located, all of him dies – and the spell he worked to destroy his original Cluster will collapse. Ragnarok unwinds, the universe rebuilds... I don’t know what happens to the other pantheons over there. I’m... almost dead certain that the entire Cluster was destroyed by what he did, not just Asgard._

 _That’s what the pantheons here are worried about,_ Steve typed out. It had to be. A force coming from outside the universe – outside their _Cluster_ of universes – one that couldn’t be contained by the forces in this one –

“I think so,” Tony agreed aloud. He glanced over at Steve for a long moment – his eyes off the road the entire time, of course – before adding, “Think you want to fill me in on what you left out for your report to SHIELD?”

Steve hesitated. Bringing a murderer to justice, a murderer of... Lord, who knew how many people – how many copies of the Nine Realms were there within a single Cluster? – surely, the Other Loki’s victims deserved justice. But if Tony had wound up creating extremis in pursuit of that goal – extremis, or other world-breaking weapons, as he’d admitted – there was a line to be drawn. True justice did not call for innocents to be sacrificed in its name.

But this wasn’t just revenge. Tony was far from the only one making preparations; an entire universe – _multiple_ universes – were on edge about an invader, readying themselves for war. If Tony had screwed up – and he _had_ – then he had done so with the best of intentions... which still didn’t count for jack squat in the face of the dead, but that hadn’t been entirely within Tony’s control; far from it. And what mistakes he had made – in trying to do it all on his own – well, at least Tony was stretching out a hand. Steve had to reach back.

So he said, “All right,” and told him, starting with how Anthony had appeared in the workshop. Parts of this he’d told Tony before, back in that other, darker world; much of it had gone into his report to SHIELD; but now he left nothing out except for what he’d been doing in the workshop in the first place. Anthony; Susan and Reed Richards; his own alternate self. The strange, other Stark Tower with its top floors missing and an even stranger structure floating in midair next to it. Rhymes and magic, chants and spells, all the advice of two different sorcerers, and the gem that had been able to see souls.

The telling took them a considerable distance into Pennsylvania, especially since he had to type out so much of it – Steve didn’t think the soul gem was something that should be discussed aloud, and Tony seemed to agree. He asked detailed questions, instead, about everything from layouts to the details of the runes that Anthony had used, which Steve did his best to draw, although with the serum having been neutralized at the time his memory wasn’t as clear as usual. The task of recollecting it all wasn’t made any easier with the way Tony drove like an absolute lunatic, swerving through gaps in the highway traffic so narrow that Steve found himself reaching for his shield.

It was for a good cause, he reminded himself firmly.

“I hate magic,” Tony sighed when Steve was done.

“It’s not all evil,” Steve defended.

Tony shook his head. “Not what I meant. I mean – _magic_ , the idea of it, the idea it can’t be understood – ” there was a deep frustration beneath his words, a dark, ugly thing that Steve took careful note of. “I’m going to figure this out, how it works.” He took a breath. “But first, extremis.”

Steve glanced out the window, at the traffic around them. He didn’t travel on highways enough – or at all, really – to know if the number of trucks and cars on the road was normal. Without air travel, were more people going cross-country by land? Or were they all staying put for fear of the nanovirus? He knew there were ongoing problems with mail delivery, but he’d had other worries, and the post situation wasn’t one that he could help.

There were more than enough vehicles to make the way Tony casually wove in-between lanes absolutely hair-raising. They nearly side-swiped a semi – well, its tires – and something crunched in Steve’s grip.

Tony glanced over. “I guess you wouldn’t need the handle to open the door anyway.”

He stuffed his hands back in his lap. The tablet might be wholly Stark-made, and therefore no doubt superior in every way to the car, but he didn’t want to risk it.

The silence was awkward. All the late-night conversations they’d used to have – eventually become day-time conversations – hadn’t been easy at first, but after months, they’d grown natural. But now... what was he supposed to say? While Steve had thought they’d been becoming friends, Tony had been hiding the fact that he’d been going crazy, and building secret evil lairs and death-machines. The chatter and humour made Tony seem like a bright spot of familiarity – but he was a stranger all the same.

Steve locked his hands together and brooded. The silence drew out – he’d have thought it would just become _silence_ , but the minutes dragged by and it didn’t get any less awkward. Probably because he still didn’t have any answers to the questions that mattered the most – he wasn’t certain he even knew what those questions _were_.

Trust Tony to turn his world upside down again.

“Well, this is awkward,” said Tony brightly after about fifteen minutes.

“Pepper and Rhodey think you’re dead, y’know.” Steve felt guilt bite at him, and shoved it away – the fact that he hadn’t really been planning to say that didn’t mean it wasn’t _true_.

“It’s safer for them that way.” Tony was calm, matter-of-fact. “Safer for me, too.”

What – “Either one of them would _die_ for you,” Steve growled. “Tony, they’re your best friends!”

“And that makes this situation shitty but doesn’t change it. I can’t do that to them, Steve. If Natasha hadn’t gotten Pepper out – well, it didn’t come to that.”

So it _had_ been Natasha.

“Rhodey’s still in, though. And he wants to stay in. The Air Force is his life.” Tony’s voice dropped, going quieter. “I’ve dragged them both down far enough. I’d like to think I’m not such a shitty friend that I can’t let go before I hit rock bottom.”

“That’s not how it works, Tony.”

“I know. Hey, you’re here, just like you asked.”

“I shouldn’t have had to,” Steve said, exasperated.

“You didn’t.”

Steve blinked. Tony’s grip was loose on the steering wheel – he’d returned to that same easy calm. Too easy? Maybe slightly robotic. It didn’t make any sense. If Tony had been willing to come and ask for help – or at least to accept that he didn’t have to do this alone – then why hadn’t he done something before now? He’d had weeks.

“Tony...”

“Oh hey, look, a Burger King,” said Tony, the cheer in his voice so genuine that Steve almost believed it. “I haven’t been there in ages!”

 

 

A few hours later, the greasy drive-thru burgers sat heavily in Steve’s stomach. He should have known it would be a mistake, he thought, suppressing a groan as he wrapped his arms around his middle. It wasn’t like he was actually sick – the serum wouldn’t let a bad burger get him down – but the strange chemical taste of it left him feeling like he _should_ be.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to bad food, or even highly processed food – rations during the War had been fuel, and generally only edible by accident. But at least that was a _familiar_ bad, learned over years of being poor in the Dirty Thirties. In Stark Tower he’d been spoiled – organic everything, meat of the finest quality cuts, take-out from places that wouldn’t have done take-out for anyone else... he just wasn’t used to the weird flavour of Fast Food America.

Or maybe the burgers really _had_ contained poison,he thought grimly, as they swerved _way too fast_ around a tight corner and his tongue recalled the uncannily alien taste of the bread.

The tiny, one-lane road they were on now wasn’t even paved! They were lucky they hadn’t skidded right off –

“Tada,” said Tony, as they pulled around a last turn, the high-beams revealing a narrowing of the road toward a small mine entrance, now covered with chain-link to keep anyone out. Anyone like... them; Tony was not slowing down, and Steve nearly reached over and ripped the wheel from his hands – “It’s an illusion, Jesus, relax.”

 Steve grit his teeth anyway as the entrance drew nearer: the chain-link wasn’t too imposing, but even a Volvo wouldn’t have fit into a tunnel that size. Passing through the image wasn’t like holding onto Tony while the ICG kept them hidden; instead of all the colours becoming more _real_ , everything blurred together instead, reminding him briefly of being fever-sick with extremis, when nothing he’d seen made any sense. Then they were past it, driving through a tunnel leading straight into the hillside. It went in only a short ways, but when Tony pulled to a stop and killed the engine, the place was pitch-dark. In daylight enough light might have made it through the entrance to see by, but it was now a cloudy night. Or would daylight have been enough? Would the illusion at the entrance have prevented it from coming through anyway?

There was a clicking noise, and a strange type of sound that Steve couldn’t quite place, and then Tony was visible, a small circle of light coming from his right hand as he got out of the car – he’d put on a repulsor at some point, and was keeping it powered just enough to show their surroundings without actually firing a beam. It looked like the entrance to an old mine – not coal, but beyond that, Steve couldn’t have said what it was anybody might have been digging for. It had clearly seen better days, though; the metal support beams were covered in grime and rust, the paint on the steel door set in concrete at the side of the small parking bay was worn almost entirely away, and the entire place had an air of... emptiness – the sort that an occupied building couldn’t achieve.

Steve _thunk_ ed his head back against the headrest several times.

The door was pulled open, and Tony stood there, shining his ‘flashlight’ into Steve's face. “Uh. You coming?”

“Get the damn light out of my face, and I will,” Steve snapped, trying to keep a whining edge out of his voice. But Good Lord, what was it that drew Tony to creepy underground secret lairs? He almost opened his mouth to ask when he’d given up on things like the Helicarrier, the _Tower_ – but clicked his teeth closed in front of his tongue instead. He wasn’t happy with Tony’s behaviour; that didn’t mean he should be cruel about it.

“Next time you build a secret evil lair, just put it in a warehouse,” he said instead. “ _Aboveground_.”

“Mines are good for hiding radiation,” said Tony, with the air of somebody trying to explain the obvious.

“What?” Tony might be immortal – and now jacked up on Extremis – but Steve didn’t have the benefit of Anthony’s wards anymore.

“Not the lethal sort, don’t worry,” said Tony cheerfully. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

The elevator down was too new to have been the mine’s original; the dull gleam of its steel was at odds with the rust and dust everywhere else, and even aside from that it just looked more... _modern_ , less rickety than the rest. He wondered if the original mine entrance they’d pulled into had been intended for cars at all – but there hadn’t been any rail-lines. He could fit what he knew about mining in a thimble, though. Heck, maybe it _was_ a coal mine. He’d assumed that a coal mine would be dirtier, but that was probably a stupid assumption. No matter was being dug out, it was from a hole in the ground.

New or not, the elevator was meant for freight, and it was slow and jerky too. “I need to recalibrate this,” said Tony contemplatively, as they rattled their way down. It was a _long_ way down – at least as far as the complex under Shenzhen, and although that made sense, it didn’t make Steve _happy_.

“Put some lights in, too,” Steve suggested, as they came to a stop and the gaps in the wire doors revealed a pitch dark hallway leading away.

“Thought you wanted me to build a new lair in a warehouse.” Tony glanced ruefully at his hand as he lifted it to illuminate the hallway, showing newer reinforcing beams covering the roof, mixed with obviously older supports holding up the walls. “Lights were... less of a priority.I didn’t lie when I told you I was all out of secret lairs, before – I had to build this one from scratch after I got back. Well, almost-scratch. I had to redecorate it from scratch, anyway.”

 Steve shook his head. The sheer _logistics_ of it... “Where’d you get the money?” He couldn’t watch Tony’s face while he answered; the ground was too uneven to keep walking without either paying close attention or tripping even second step.

“Markets are an easy play – seriously, people are idiots. Anybody with a brain comes along, boop, money just piles up.”

“Markets are at the bottom of a pit deeper than this one.”

“But still trading, which really doesn’t contradict anything I just said.”

Ahead of them, steel blast doors – Steve grimaced again – opened automatically, revealing yet-more darkness beyond. Tony shone his light around the room they stepped into, playing it over bulky metal boxes of computer equipment, cords _everywhere_ – and thicker power cables, a half-dozen running up the walls to each of the many reflector panels positioned overhead. It was still completely dark.

“Portal Mark Four – energy-looping, biomass stable, sized for up to four adults or eight midgets,” Tony said proudly, as a humming grew all around them – things turning on by themselves... or maybe that was extremis. There were still no lights.

“You sure about where we’re going?” Steve asked, unslinging his shield and running his hands nervously over the edge.

“Yep, let me – dress you up, first,” Tony said, changing directions mid-sentence. The light bobbed away and Steve turned his back instead of watching it go, letting his eyes adjust until the ambient allowed him to see a clearer picture of the room than when Tony had been waving the source around, blinding. Not that it was a much better picture – it was still too dark – but it gave him a better overall view.

It was _big,_ bigger even than the portal setup in Shenzhen, which had dwarfed the one he’d actually seen in action in New Orleans. The reflector panels were so densely packed that they formed a layered half-sphere at the far end of the short, stubby oval setup. Unlike both of the previous devices that Steve had seen, this one didn’t have a single laser – it had five, arrayed in a precise pentagon. Had Tony borrowed that idea from magic? Behind the lasers were two enormous, bulky machines that Steve couldn’t make heads or tails of, except to realize that apparently they were meant to be able to move by means of tracks along the ceiling – one to swing into place and attach to the lasers while the other moved back to stay out of the way, or vice versa. So: the portal was what Tony had said it was, but the device could also be something else...

Footsteps hurried back; Steve turned, and caught fabric as it was thrown at him, and then nearly dropped it before he could get a grip on it. It was slipperier than silk. It couldn’t be silk, could it? It was way too light.

“Strip, put that on,” Tony ordered imperiously. “First layer – breathes like a dream, heat and cold resistant, and yes, I included undies. Now, _this_ ,” he brandished a pair of pants that Steve couldn’t quite see, not with how Tony was holding them up with the same hand that had the light source – Steve rolled his eyes, beginning to undress, and Tony declaimed, “This makes modern body-armour weep – it’s the best you’re going to get short of stuffing you into a suit, which, yes, I considered for this trip. Humans are squishy, Steve. _This_ is three times as impact-resistant as SHIELD’s best stuff, ten times as resistant to knives – creating it was easier than trying to sew it up into a suit for you, you have no idea. If by some very remote chance somebody actually manages to make a hole in it, it has self-repairing nanites, though it could take a while. Flame resistant, acid resistant, _alkali_ resistant, just generally... resistant, here.”

Steve pulled the underlayer’s top half over his head, trying not to marvel at the feel of it against his skin; and he’d thought the sheets in Stark Tower were opulent. This was like wearing water. He grabbed the outerlayer pants as Tony tossed them over, too, hopping on stocking feet to pull them on, and then sat down on a convenient metal box nearby, ignoring the humming machinery beneath, to pull on the boots that Tony handed over next.

“Bright red, thick grips, puncture-proof, heck, chain-saw proof, but malleable enough to climb in...” The top followed. “Blue chainmail, because actually it’s not a half-bad idea, if you make it out of stuff that won’t rattle and an alloy about as strong as mithril. Gloves, utility belt – ”

“I’m not Batman.”

“Please, Batman has even worse fashion sense than you. Full black went out of style with the nineties.” Tony sniffed.

“You dyed your hair blond, you don’t get to talk.”

“ _Ouch_. Okay, but stripped-down field medkit, emergency rations – I know how you burn through food, Steve, but go easy on these because even you could get fat off of them – ”

“I thought you said this was gonna be a quick trip. Non-hostile,” said Steve, standing up again to put the belt on.

Everything fit perfectly. Of course it did.

“Non-hostile except for applications of Murphy’s Law, and let’s face it, we have shit luck,” said Tony, dark eyes gleaming in the low light. “Still, I can actually _show_ you where we’re going.”

Lasers began powering up, and Steve hurriedly followed Tony as he moved out of the way. His guess about the two machines behind them had been correct: one slid forward now and hooked in, Tony stepping up to force clamps down – apparently, not everything in this place ran on electricity. The way the rest of the machinery continued to do its own thing, independent of any apparent direction...

Lord. He’d thought that Tony’s trick with the tablet was weird enough.

“Eyes,” said Tony, handing over a pair of goggles. He didn’t have any for himself, Steve noted as he put them on. They made the blue light of the laser generators turn green, casting everything in a freakish glow, as the intensity reached peak and five beams of light winked into existence, bouncing off of the reflector panels and converging to a point. A bubbling pool began to spread outward – and reflected in it was a bizarrely-coloured version of an otherwise familiar courtyard.

“Seemed like a good place to start,” said Tony.

Steve nodded, staring at the image. “Probably.” He tilted his head. “How’d you figure out where it was?” From the way Thor and Bruce had talked about those addresses, it couldn’t be easy – it should have been near-impossible, even for somebody with Tony’s brain. Apparently there were calculations large enough that even supercomputers bowed down before them.

“What, Fury didn’t tell you? He got our, ah, alien friend to tell him. It’s in the SHIELD database.” And Tony had about as much respect for SHIELD’s cybersecurity as he had for the Volvo. “Beautiful location, actually... it’s weird, dimensionally speaking – it shares 3D space with us, how cool is that? It’s _outside the observable universe,_ and the way it’s all _connected_ , good god, honestly, I don’t know if I could’ve done it without Foster doing the groundwork. I would like to have sex with Foster’s brain. We would have beautiful, beautiful ideas together.”

“Tony!” Steve winced, honestly shocked – Tony didn’t usually get that crass until he was trying to be shocking, at least not in Steve’s presence, but there was nothing troll-ish in the dreamy look that Tony had been wearing when he’d said that. Was it the effect of being made younger by twenty years, or was it some other side-effect of being wired up like a computer? Steve sighed. “You know, you _could_ just come work with her.”

“Maybe when we’re done here,” Tony said, the enthusiasm gone from his voice like it had never existed. Steve refused to feel bad about that. Really, he did.

The frantic hum of machinery changed again; the beams thinned, and the window in the air collapsed back into nothing as they powered down and Tony stepped forward to release the clamps. The other apparatus – it had to be the one that would make a portal – was already rotating forward. “Don’t need goggles for this one,” said Tony, giving a grunt as he pushed away the one and pulled the other into place. The hum began cycling up again.

“Why’s it so much bigger?” Steve asked, peeling off the goggles and tossing them to the side. For all that he’d done this before... he was not a fan of having lasers shot at him, and having _five_ instead of just one didn’t make it any better. He at least wanted to know _why_ there were five.

“Like I said, Maklu’s in a weird location – it takes a lot of power to get there,” Tony said, stepping forward. Steve joined him, suppressing a swallow. “I guess you could call it the furthest point in the marble store – actually, I’m not sure it’s not right in the centre, but it starts looking like a fractal, so, distance – I haven’t had time to run enough tests, though. Ready?”

He had no idea what a fractal was. “When you are.”

“Here we go,” said Tony, and blue light washed the world away.


	2. The White Road

Light-blindness lingered for a moment after his feet hit the ground again, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing, so Steve let his eyes recover and listened. Beside him was Tony: his breathing only barely audible – completely inaudible to any normal human – but his shifting twitchiness much louder. If there was anyone else around, they were either very good at being quiet, or a bird; there were plenty of those chirping, along with the rustle and hum of insects going about their lives. The air smelled crisp and clear, a purity that threw the memory of the Chief Magistrate’s pagoda into sharp relief.

His eyes finished adjusting, and Steve took in his surroundings. They were standing on a road made from some sort of white stone – or something that looked like white stone; he couldn’t see any sort of joins between stone blocks. It also wasn’t made out of the same sort of stone as the mountains that surrounded them, which looked ordinary enough at first glance, but contained trees and shrubs that looked... off, somehow. Different from the ones he’d seen in Europe. The road was cut into the slopes, with more of the same white stone reinforcing the cut-away wall, and they were at an outward curve, looking over a frankly stunning view of the valley and the next mountain across, as well as the sinuous winding of the road until it vanished across a pass.

Why the hell did he always end up on roads? He should probably ask Tony. Maybe there was some magical reason for it – they were dimensional travellers, so they ended up on roads.

But at the moment, there were more pressing questions.

“ _Tony_ ,” Steve growled.

“Shit.” Tony was staring out over the valley with an expression of disbelief. “What – but – the _math_ – ”

That wasn’t exactly the reaction Steve had been expecting, although it was uncomfortably reassuring. He needed to be _careful_ around Tony, but Tony was still his friend. Maybe he was being too uncharitable. “I’ve seen you screw up math before, Tony.”

“Yeah, yeah, displace a decimal, it happens to the best of us after the second sleepless night – but not me. Not anymore.” Tony cut himself off with a sharp downward slash of his hand, and took a deep breath. “Damn it. Maklu must have defences I couldn’t pick up.”

“So it... bounced us somewhere else?” Strange had mentioned not being able to access Asgard, or other divine realms. Had this been what he’d meant?

“Looks like,” Tony said grimly. “Damn it! I was so sure – I can _detect_ the barriers around Asgard. They’re subtle, not invisible!”

“Okay, so we get back home, and...”

Tony huffed a laugh. “Yeah, that’s gonna be a problem. I was kinda counting on the makluans for that.”

Steve pinched the bridge of his nose. He didn’t _actually_ have a headache; he just felt like he should have one. But there was no use crying over spilt milk. “Okay. Somebody built this road. Even if they don’t have a portal system – ”

“ – they’ve got the tech to build something like this, they probably have enough tech I can build it myself,” Tony finished. He crouched down, scraping a fingernail over the white stone. “Huh. Looks like stone, feels like stone – isometrics say it’s definitely artificial. Maybe even – _oooh,_ enough tech to build an entire road out of this? Operation Go Home is a go.”

“That’s a terrible name for an operation,” Steve informed him. He took stock of the two ways the road wound. “Getting to some sort of civilization will be the main problem. We’ve got food, but only one water bottle – though there might be some sort of creek along the way.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning on walking.” Tony stood, his clothes... _shimmering?_ The question answered itself a moment later, as jeans and jacket turned metallic red and gold, and the backpack began melting too, pouring over Tony’s body until he was encased head-to-toe in armour.

Okay, that was pretty impressive. “What happened to my water bottle?” Steve demanded, not sure he wanted to know the answer. The tablet, too, but he had been going to _drink_ from that!

The pout was audible in Tony’s reply. _“I left it back on Earth. Jeez, you’re a tough customer.”_ Tony shook his head – the gesture looked... _wrong_. The old Iron Man suit was a marvel, but it had gears and machinery behind it, weight that emphasized that even if it was human-sized, it packed a _lot_ more power. This, though... Tony might have still been standing there in street clothes, it moved _that_ fluidly. _“You coming?”_ He held out a hand.

Steve took a step back despite himself. “You are not carrying me all that way by the scruff of my neck.” Tony had only ever done it to him that one time, but that was more than enough to know that Tony’s preferred method would _not_ work for a flight any longer than a brief boost to higher ground.

 _“I would not carry you around like that.”_ Tony actually sounded sort of indignant about that. _“Not for any other purpose than a prank. I’ll magnetize your chainmail, it’ll be fine. No, no – semi-piggyback style, Rogers, you’re not an infant and I need my hands free, that means I need the front of me free – ”_

 _All the indignities in the world’d be worth it for this view,_ Steve thought dazedly half a minute later, as they soared up toward the clouds. It was nothing like that one, brief. The Mark VIII – hastily assembled after the Mark VII had died such a glorious death so soon from its cradle – hadn’t had anything like the magnetic lock Tony was using, and it had had repulsors on the back like its predecessor, anyway. But this... the view from Stark Tower was amazing; the view from the Helicarrier, stunning. This, though – this was a mountain range spread out before him, nothing beneath his feet but air, only Tony’s magnetic grip on him keeping him up.

“Wow,” he breathed.  The frosty air nipped at his exposed face but, to Tony’s credit, not at any of the rest of him. Below them the white road spread twined through the mountains like a ribbon, gleaming wherever the sun struck it, and occasionally sending off smaller offshoots to wend their ways through the mountains. One valley over, the road wrapped up to cultivated fields, with small houses dotted about them – “Tony, over there?”

 _“Farmers,”_ Tony shook his head as he gave the answer over the comm. _“There’s a city out in the foothills, about a twenty minute flight.”_

Steve couldn’t see that far – for all that they were above the mountain peaks, they were staying low, far below the spotty cloud-cover. “Then let’s go.”

Flying was really, _really_ fun. And this was when Tony was going slow to compensate for his un-suited passenger. Steve didn’t exactly want an entire _suit_ , but... maybe he could convince Tony to give him jet-boots, in the next uniform upgrade. After all, it was Tony – there _would_ be another uniform upgrade... Steve caught himself. Maybe there wouldn’t. They hadn’t managed to make it to Maklu after all; they were going to be returning to Earth without a cure. And Tony...

Could he let Tony just run away, if Tony tried? _Would_ Tony try? There were people back on Earth who wanted to kill _Pepper_ for the nanoplague; what would they do to Tony, if they knew he was alive? Except that in Tony’s case, Steve couldn’t honestly say that Tony shouldn’t be paying some form of recompense.

It was enough to put a damper even on flying.

 _“Back to civilization,”_ Tony said, as they zipped through the last high mountain pass and the foothills rolled away beneath them. The city Tony had mentioned was probably ten more miles out, at the end of the road, which had widened – from this distance, Steve couldn’t be sure, but he thought it would probably rival a modern freeway. The city, though, didn’t look modern at _all_ , except for its sprawling size: there were some tall buildings, but they were just overall large, not sky-scraping towers. And it was surrounded with concentric rings of stone walls. Even if it was made of the same white rock as the road, modern cities didn’t bother with walls like that. At least the architecture was reminiscent of the short look that he’d had at Maklu: maybe they weren’t too far off.

Maybe they _could_ find a cure here... he squinted, despite knowing it wouldn’t actually help. By the time they’d gotten to a mile out, he was pretty sure that even the wall frescos were much the same.

 _“...maybe this_ is _Maklu_ ,” Tony said, not quite echoing Steve’s thoughts. _“Slight calibration error? Quasar dipped at the wrong moment, bent space-time a bit in an odd direction? Hmm – woah!”_

They dropped, Steve’s stomach lurching up into his throat as Tony stopped playing nice for his guest and turned on some _real_ acceleration. The world flipped end over end as Tony took evasive manoeuvres – revealing scales, bright red in sunlight, and another form – long and sinuous and blue – dropping out of the clouds behind the first makluan. The ground drew terrifyingly close, and then they were _stopping_ , with enough G-forces that Steve didn’t manage to land on his feet when Tony suddenly cut the magnetic lock. He rolled, soft dirt further padding the impact, and came up, shield in hand, just in time to watch Tony rocket upward between the two alien dragons. One breathed fire at him – a thousand-foot long jet of green.

_“Sorry, Steve, can’t really fight with you hanging on.”_

Steve swore. Trapped on the ground, and there was no way up there – _damnit!_ Thor and the Chief Magistrate had claimed that makluans were peaceful, but apparently Fin Fang Foom wasn’t the only one of his people with tendencies toward destruction and mayhem.

 _Think_ – what did he have on his side? The city they’d been approaching was maybe a mile away now, the road crossing at an angle between him and it – he started running toward it. Possibly not the best idea, but between action and sitting on his hands, he’d take action any day. There might be someone there who knew what was going on and could put a stop to it – or, failing that, they might have another way into the air.

A bellow like thunder split the air, and Steve glanced up, catching snapshots of the fight as he ran. One of the dragons was thrashing in midair, its eyes no longer glowing but now blackened and burnt. _Oh, nasty shot, Tony._ The other makluan had coiled about beneath its wounded comrade, a position of wary support – and then three more of the dragons rose from the city ahead of Steve, snaking through the air to join the fight. One of them, a forest-green fellow, was at least twice as long as either of the first two – and _fast_ , shooting ahead of the others and blasting out a broad jet of blue-white fire that completely encompassed Tony.

“Tony? _Tony!”_

 _“Busy!”_  His voice was so terse Steve couldn’t tell if Tony was just distracted, or something worse. At least he was alive.

Steve ran faster, and prayed. His next stolen glimpse of the fight showed no Tony – no Tony – and then there he was, a tiny figure in now-black armour, corkscrewing about the giant serpent and attacking with a bright blue laser shooting out of one wrist. It didn’t cut the makluan to shreds as easily as Tony had cut the engine apart on the Helicarrier, but it made the beast give out one of those thunderous roars of pain, loud and close– the fight had moved almost right over Steve’s head. But yet more dragons were rising from the city – along with smaller fliers, now, riding chariots or flying under their own power.

He hit the last stretch, a half-mile sprint to the city gates – now opening and pouring forth with land troops. Apparently he hadn’t been as forgotten as he’d thought. Riders were first, armoured foes on six-legged not-horses – three legs abreast, and with four of the beasts lined up side-by-side they made a nightmare of galloping hooves, alien and strange. But _his_ nightmares weren’t about the things in the dark that might come for him. These were enemies, attacking without warning or provocation; gear, manner, and movement told him in an instant that they were clearly professional soldiers. He wouldn’t be hurting innocents; no one was going to die here who hadn’t signed up willing.

A pair of thunderous roars accompanied more fire lighting up the sky, but he was closing fast on his own targets, now. The two riders in the middle had lances, but the other two had swords. Steve considered angles in his head, skidded to a halt, and planted his feet. Masked helmets stared down at him, drawing closer, closer –

He dove left, shield trailing on his arm, lashing out and around to take out the left-most beast’s closest back leg. It screamed, but didn’t go down; six legs could be an advantage. The jarring impact numbed his arm briefly, but after two months of fighting zombies and nearly a year of training with SHIELD, he was in better fighting shape than he had been during the War; he pivoted, knowing that the riders were already wheeling their mounts around, ready to come up behind him and catch him between them and the second set arriving – now.

This time, he jumped _up_ , clearing the slashing swords and twisting in mid-air, reaching out to grab onto the middle rider rushing by... who apparently wasn’t as firmly in his saddle as Steve had thought, because instead of landing on the back of the steed like he’d planned, both he and his hand-hold kept their own momentum and landed back on the hard surface of the road, the rider getting a knee to the gut more by accident than planning.

Two waves of cavalry vs. a lone infantry man was either overkill or shit tactics, depending on the infantry in question – but now there were enemy infantry coming up, pike-men covering archers further behind. Steve brushed aside arrows, not even bothering to hide behind his shield; they were slow enough he could block them as they came. Why didn’t these people have _guns?_

He wrested one pike away from its bearer and used it to knock a half-dozen of them flat, then threw his shield and ducked into a roll to avoid the hail of arrows, even though he didn’t need to –

A sudden sense of pressure, and an arrow flying away half-broken, made him rapidly rethink that assumption. Right, aliens. A dragon had been able to take down a fighter-jet; why _wouldn’t_ these people have ultra-sharp arrows that could cut through even Tony’s armour? The arrow hadn’t managed to slice much through the outer layer before it had broken, but they had a _lot_ of arrows – Steve ducked behind a pair of pike-bearers, mentally cursing. The archers were damn near frightening in their precision – in firing into general melee, they hadn’t yet hit a single one of their own people. Two more shots grazed him, but there was no time to check if Tony’s suit had lived up to its billing; his shield arced back, and the melee closed again. These guys might have been fighting with archaic weaponry and tactics, but they pulled it off well, engaging him on as many sides as they could fit people with room still to move. He wished he’d asked Tony for a gun; he wouldn’t pick one over his shield, but he needed a secondary weapon right now.  

 _“Shit,”_ said Tony in his ear, voice breathless. _“These guys just keep_ coming _. They’ve got some serious –_ ack _– firepower – ”_

He’d take Tony’s word for it; though why they were restricting themselves so heavily down here, he didn’t know. He didn’t think he’d killed anybody, yet, but a fight was a fight – he swatted an arrow, decapitated a pike, and kicked a sword out of a rider’s hand, crushing the guy’s fingers as he did so. “What – ” dodge; his boot skidded on something on the white stone, and he nearly went down, which was the last thing he wanted to do while surrounded; he turned it into a flying back-kick instead – “the _hell_ – ” his fingers dug into an armoured wrist, and the armour lost – it wasn’t metal, but some sort of leather instead – a sword dropped from nerveless fingers, and Steve kicked it up into his now-free hand – “is your – ” he hamstrung two enemies in neat succession with the sword, bashed a third over the head with his shield – “ _problem?”_

He must have missed a signal, because they backed off in concert, forming into a tight circle (but _wide_ – there were way too many of them for Steve’s taste) instead. It was broken as one of the riders who had managed to avoid getting knocked off his sorta-horse pulled up at the outer ring and shouldered his way through. _Not_ one of the first few riders, Steve realized a moment later; this guy’s armour was much more heavily ornate than theirs had been, to the point of being non-functional for combat. Were looks deceiving, the guy an idiot, or was this a truce?

“You ask this of us?” _she_ demanded, in a voice that was definitely female. “Do you then bow to our superiority?”

“I don’t bow to anyone, but I’d like to resolve this without fighting.” _Further_ fighting. Above them, Tony’s battle continued.

 _“I’ll bow, if it’d make them stop shooting firegoddamnit,”_ Tony put in grimly, his voice rising frantically at the end, and okay, maybe Steve would be bowing. Damn it.

“You are willful trespassers, who have attacked the loyal guardians of this city without warning, and grievously injured several,” the rider replied, her voice stern. “There can be no other resolution other than your submission to justice; and we shall fight you up and down the mountains until you cry surrender.”

 _“What,_ we _attacked – ”_ Tony was protesting indignantly in his ear.

Steve ignored him, because he wasn’t saying anything that Steve wasn’t already thinking. “Ma’am, your guards attacked us first – we weren’t doing anything!”

“Precisely! You declared not your names, nor your intentions, nor the origin of your passports; and it is right and meet that all in these lands shall do so. Of that crime you are charged, and must be tried and if found guilty sentenced by our magistrates. Will you submit, or must we grind you into the earth and drag you forth in chains?”

Steve looked up, craning his head. The noise of the battle had stopped, but there were at least ten of the makluans still up there, circling in a sphere around a tiny black figure, the sinuous movements of their bodies making it difficult to count their true numbers at a glance. But there were _way_ more than ten of their smaller allies.

 _“Despite ignorance of the law typically not being accepted as a valid excuse – believe me, I’ve tried – I’d have to say go with ‘em on this one, Steve,”_ Tony advised. He still sounded winded – how many hits had he taken? _“If nothing else because it’ll be easier to hide out in a city than out here.”_

“Yeah, I thought of that,” Steve muttered, and dropped his stolen sword. “Alright, fine. We surrender.”

 

 

Prison kinda sucked.

It wasn’t that Steve hadn’t seen worse. Granted, in the War he was always the guy breaking people _out_ of prisons; up until he’d handed himself over to Schmidtt at the end, he’d managed to avoid getting captured. For a first time on the opposite side of the bars, though, he knew it wasn’t that bad: they’d been allowed to keep their gear, and they hadn’t even been searched – which, considering the arsenal that Tony carried around, seemed really foolish. But it didn’t change the fact that they were in a dungeon, complete with straw strewn across the floor. It looked like clean straw. Steve _hoped_ it was clean straw, more for Tony’s peace of mind than his own. Tony was currently standing near to the door, having adamantly refused to even consider sitting down like Steve was doing, and had spent the entire time since they’d arrived here volubly contemplating the hygienic drawbacks of having armour that functioned something like a second skin. At least the armour was no longer totally blackened and charred; the damage done by the dragonfire had been repairing itself steadily. Its slow but noticeable progress was strangely fascinating.

“ – I swear to god, I am going to boil every last inch. Antibacterial soap – Jesus, does that stuff even work on extraterrestrial bacteria? I’m sure Bruce would have a field day, but there is no way in hell that I’m – ”

There was a pair of guards standing at the entrance of the dungeon, beside the wide stone stairs leading up. The stairs were more of that strange white not-stone, just like their cell, although the walls in here were much... grimier. The guards had been doing a good job of staying like statues for most of Tony’s rant. But mercifully, one of the guards must have finally had enough, because he strode forward, planted his strange spear-staff on the ground, and ordered in exasperation, “Hold your tongue, and be silent! You offend the ear of every prisoner and guard within this place with your moaning complaints!”

Steve tilted his head, comparing his words to the way the captain had spoken earlier. It was sort of reminiscent of the way Thor spoke, or the... people... he’d met in the Infinite Embassy; maybe it was something to do with the Allspeech? They couldn’t possibly be speaking English by accident.  

“Oh, right, I should just shut up and be a happy prisoner,” Tony sneered. “Who cares that we’ve been interred in a filth-infested rat-house for no good cause? Nah, you’ve got visitors from another realm, it’s best to just shoot _fire_ at them and then claim it’s their fault. I guess it’s one way of getting out of paying were-gild, though it sure explains why you owe a lot of it.”

Steve rose to his feet, though he stayed away from the bars. What was Tony doing? Well, it was pretty obvious _what_ he was doing – Steve just wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t make the situation worse. During the short trip here they’d both protested about being delegates from Earth (and this was why they should have sent _actual_ diplomats, Steve thought moodily), and wanting to speak to somebody in charge, but their captor had dismissed Earth with an unimpressed wave of her hand and told them that their hearing would come soon enough. And then they’d been thrown in the dungeon. Generally, antagonizing your captors once you were already in the dungeon was supposed to be a bad idea, at least if you were dumb enough to _still_ be hoping they might cooperate.

“Were-gild? What is this charge?”

“Déhuá...” the guard’s partner said, her voice warning.

“If they are owed honourable debts, then these must be fulfilled,” Dehua said firmly. “I shall go inquire.”

“First fetch another to take your place,” the other sighed, leaning on her staff-spear – Steve wasn’t sure what exactly felt so wrong about those weapons, but he wasn’t going to give them a name until he knew. Déhua nodded briskly and left, his sandaled feet making only the quietest of rasps against the stone.

Huh. Tony’s goading had actually worked. 

 _“Not bad, hey?”_ Tony said smugly. Or... _sent_ smugly; Steve heard it clearly through the radio, but Tony had the faceplate retracted and Steve could _see_ that his lips hadn’t moved. _Hivemind_ , Tony had said, and _wireless signals_.

 _I guess that’s how all the zombies know to swarm_. Right. That was a pleasant thought.

“If you were bringing news of honourable debts to be paid, then you should have approached honourably,” the remaining guard informed them, sounding deeply unimpressed. “You should be ashamed.”

“We _did_ approach honourably,” Tony sighed.

Steve stepped forward, holding up a hand. “We’re not from your world. We didn’t know of your customs.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the guard said firmly, and Steve had to suppress an eye-roll at the sight of Tony mouthing the latter half of the phrase in sync with her. “You are poor representatives to not know this. By rash impetuosity you have endangered the repayment of debts and the fulfilment of promises made. A criminal cannot make representation before the king. This will cause the reparations to be greatly delayed, and throw the order of the court into turmoil for many years.” She shook her head. “You should be very ashamed.”

 _“O-kay,”_ said Tony slowly, soundlessly, _“These people are strange.”_

They were on another world. Gods looked human – on the surface. How was Steve still surprised that these people’s logic seemed based on a different set of values? But he was.

Dehua returned shortly, followed by two more guards. “The judge has agreed to expedite your case,” he reported solemnly, as he stepped forward and unhooked a set of archaic keys from his belt, fitting one into the lock. A burst of light belied technology beneath, though, and Steve frowned. They had dungeons, magic-like-tech keys, flying chariots, dragons, bows and arrows – it had to be enough to let Tony build them a way home, right?

“This way,” Dehua commanded, leading them while his partner brought up the rear. Steve caught Tony’s eye and nodded acknowledgement – _good work_.

They were led out, down a confusing maze of hallways – Steve had to keep track in his head by memory and direction alone; the white walls all looked the same – and into a courtyard of colours that seemed extra-vibrant after all the stark, undecorated stone. Upon a raised dais sat a chair that looked incongruously delicate next to all the stone – although it did fit in with the paper roof – and which was occupied by the man who was presumably their judge; everyone else in the room looked content to stand.

The judge – a short man with an unlined face, despite possessing an entirely grey head of hair – peered down at them from his seat. “Hmph. These are the accused? Let the clerk read out their crimes.”

A young woman with a scroll stepped forward, and read, “On this day, these two men, who claim as their names Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, trespassed wilfully into the lands of this kingdom. In this act they assaulted many of our guard, resulting in one death, four maimings, and other lesser injuries.”

Steve winced, and saw Tony’s eyes twitch slightly – a suppression of the same.

“Trespass, hmm? Let the accused present their passports for examination by this court.”

What? Steve glanced to Tony, startled. Of all the – he _had_ a passport, but he hadn’t thought it would be any use on an interplanetary trip!

“Uh, right,” said Tony, looking just as surprised. “Passports. Right, I – have...” he thumbed a panel on the chest of the armour, and it opened enough for him to pull out two small bound booklets: passports.

When had he – well, it wasn’t as though Tony had much respect for other people’s security. Though at least one of those had to be a forgery; Tony was legally _dead_. Unless he’d – he’d pulled them from a panel _in his armour_ , Steve realized, but it was too late to say anything; the clerk had already taken them and handed them over to the judge, who flicked through the first, then the second, and then sniffed them both.

Then set them to the side and leaned forward, frowning sternly at them both. “Lying to a judge? This is terrible behaviour. You have been granted the favour of an expedited hearing, and now you present false evidence?” He picked up the passports again and rapped them against the side of his chair; they both dissolved into metallic ash. Steve had guessed right – it _was_ extremis. “Let the court records reflect the addition of one count of perjury to the charges.”

They were going to a city to ask these people for help with extremis, and Tony tried to _trick_ them with it? Or – okay, maybe the armour was something separate, but they were asking these people for help _with technology that Tony couldn’t understand_ –

Good Lord, for a genius Tony could be really dumb sometimes. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve apologized, hands up, before Tony could say anything that might make the situation worse. How the hell was it that he managed to manipulate the situation so well in with the guard, and now he’d just _blown_ it? Maybe because the one time he’d been telling the truth, even if it was as obnoxiously as possible... “Look, my friend’s an idiot and I need to keep him on a leash, but our mission is real – and so’s our claim. We’ve got people dying because of a plague unleashed by one of _your_ people, a criminal you guys kicked out, and Th – an ally of ours from another world told us we could get were-gild for it. What we need is a _cure_.”

The judge regarded him sternly. “That is a matter to be dealt with by the king, and the king cannot deal with criminals. Therefore you must be found innocent, or found guilty and fulfill the sentence, before you may see him. Now, have you any true passports, or shall we note you have none and proceed?”

“We have passports,” said Steve. “But they’re at home. We didn’t know we needed them.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” said the judge. “Let the court records reflect the addition of two counts of unlawful trespass to the charges, and that the accused plead guilty to the counts of unlawful trespass.”

How had he managed to make things _worse?_ “But you’re already charging us with trespassing. You can’t just charge us twice for the same thing.”

“You were arrested for _wilful_ trespass; but even then you might have carried lawful documentation,” the judge explained – patiently, but no less sternly. Oh, no. Here was somebody who really loved the fine print of detailed law. “But as you have admitted you have no passports, then you can have no lawful reason to be within this territory.”

“What, not even if we’re from this territory?” asked Tony. “And by the way, I totally have a passport – I did _not_ plead guilty, thanks.”

“It’s a fake. Your actions plead for you. And if you had been of this territory, then you would not have crossed into it.” The judge actually looked sorrowful. “Your ruler chose poor delegates; but perhaps you were all that could be spared in the face of the plague. Nonetheless, the great wheels of civilization cannot allow a rough pebble to alter their course, or a great many more calamities shall result. We shall move to the pleas. Against one count of wilful trespass each, and one count of perjury for you,” this was directed to Tony, “how do you plead?”

“Not guilty, on Steve’s behalf. I flew him over, there was no act of will on his part involved,” Tony said promptly. “Seriously, I had him mag-locked to my armour, it wasn’t like he was going to get away. And he didn’t know about the forgery either, that’s my bad.”

“Tony,” Steve said, and then cut himself off. Okay, so this had... potential, actually. If it let one of them reach the king – he didn’t like Tony leaving himself dangling like bait, though. They’d killed somebody on the way in – in self-defence, but these people worked by different rules, or they wouldn’t have been fighting for their lives at all.

_“Trust me, Steve, I’ll be fine. And we need that cure.”_

“Shut up, Tony,” Steve said, as quietly as he could, because if these people had build extremis and could blast a bit of Tony’s nanomachines to dust, then what else could they do – or overhear?

“Do you dispute this plea?” the judge asked Steve.

“I – no, I guess I plead not guilty,” Steve said reluctantly.

“Then, Tony Stark, I find you guilty of one count of perjury, one count of unlawful trespass, and one count of wilful trespass. The question now remains as to the guilt of Steve Rogers. Let Tony Stark be removed from the place of the accused.”

For a brief, horrible moment Steve wondered if they were going to be split up – as if it wasn’t bad enough that they were already alone and on trial in an alien city – but instead Dehua just escorted him to the side of the courtroom, to stand with several other guards – some sporting injuries – and after a moment he realized that they were the witnesses for the case.

He really wished they’d brought along a lawyer. Hell, he wished they’d brought along a proper _diplomat_. Who had training in law. This was insane.

“The claim is made that Steve Rogers did not commit trespass of his own will, but was transported within our territory by another, and could not have reasonably prevented such an act,” said the judge. “This claim has been made by Tony Stark. Are there any other witnesses to the event who could shed light on such a matter?”

“Do I count?” Steve asked, immediately regretting it. After all the times his smart mouth had gotten him in trouble with Phillips, how had he not yet _learned_ –  

But the judge regarded him with no more sternness than he had previously shown – though, that was quite enough to start. “No. You have already pled not guilty.”

The clerk stepped forward, a slate in her hand, along with something that looked more like a paintbrush than a pen. “Honourable judge, the guard that witnessed the act of trespass itself was the one slain.”

“Then let him be brought forth to present testimony.”

The judge must have misheard. Either that, or _Steve_ had misheard.

“Honourable judge, he was a dragon in this life, and so newly dead that he could not possibly be called upon by any lesser sage than the Great Sage Soen.”

“Then let the presence of the Great Sage be requested, that the wheels of civilization may swiftly be returned to their tracks,” said the judge irritably, and the clerk bowed low and left.

And then they waited.

 _Everybody_ waited. For all that the judge seemed to be in a hurry, he apparently didn’t care to do anything else in the meantime. They waited, and they all stayed standing except for the judge. Nobody spoke. The judge might have been meditating – or napping. His eyes were closed.

_“Hmm.”_

Steve glanced over to where Tony was standing with the other witnesses. He... also looked like he was napping, standing up in the armour. Steve raised an eyebrow – _What?_

 _“I’m not finding any traces of tech that’s like extremis, Steve. The trick that he did with melting the nanites – which I’m going to have to replace,”_ Tony sounded indignant about this, which was a bit rich considering he’d been trying to lie to a judge, _“ – it’s not nanite-targeted, it’s the_ metal _it goes after... I think I need to make some modifications. I think I can use a sort of destructive interference to stop it.”_

Steve felt his eyes widen, and he nodded – small, but emphatic. If they could rip apart Tony’s armour that easily – well, it brought to mind the question of why _hadn’t_ they, when it would have brought Tony down in an instant? And falling from that height...

Tony was immortal, he recalled belatedly. It was easy to forget – maybe because it didn’t feel real. Not after the number of times Tony had gone missing. And he could be hurt – falling from that height... and Tony had said he had been dying when he took extremis.

Tony needed to give some better answers, Steve decided darkly. The latter half of their road trip had been awkward small-talk, written explanations of tech that Steve had no hope of understanding, and a short video tour of an alternate-reality Asgard. Nothing of real use.

“You’re not concerned about them raising the dead?” he muttered, as quietly as he could; in the quiet calm of the courtyard it still sounded way too loud to his ears. But nobody hushed him, or even shot him a glare – nobody looked at him at all. Maybe they hadn’t heard him. Maybe they were ignoring him. He couldn’t tell.

_“Sure, but I have to wait until they get back with their sage, don’t I?”_

Of course he didn’t care. “You think it’s possible? I thought you were an atheist.” An atheist... it didn’t mean the same thing as it had when Steve had been growing up. Gods walked the world in the twenty-first century; Steve had met them, and seen just how much they weren’t _God_.

_You shoulda talked to a priest before now, Rogers._

He knew he should have. The impossible reaches of the Infinite Embassy... what happened to _souls?_ If the Chief Magistrate believed in God, then so could he – no matter the fissure of shame in his soul over needing _evidence;_ he wasn’t Job. He just had to accept his own failings. But he still wondered... where did souls _go_ , after death? Were they abandoned to those cruel lesser gods, so full of fault and human error?

_“I am an atheist. I don’t get why you worship a god – no, okay, I do. I just... don’t agree with those reasons, but since I happen to want to avoid pissing you off when I’ve already fucked up today, and it’s not a hill worth dying on – I think they’re stupid reasons, okay? But they’re yours. I get that.”_

“Gee, thanks.” It didn’t explain anything.

 _“I’ve talked to the dead before.”_ It was too casual. He wasn’t lying – but the tone, itself, that was a lie – what did that mean?

“Where?”

_“In Hell. Plenty of dead people there. H- uh, she-who-sounds-like-her-realm herself qualifies, you know?”_

_Hell?_ Merciful God, Tony had been in _Hell_ at some point? And Steve did believe in a merciful God – in a higher purpose –

Something of his thoughts must have shown on Steve’s face, because Tony’s answer wasn’t in any way glib. _“It was where I first wound up when I – fell. I can’t – we can’t_ talk _about this, Steve. I don’t know if it counts if there’s_ any _sort of auditory component, or strictly verbal, but I can’t take that chance.”_

“You are not avoiding this,” Steve said, and this time it was closer to a growl than a mutter, deep in his throat.

 _“No, but it’s not exactly the best time.”_ There was a single, half-strangled thread in Tony’s voice that hinted that he might have been affected by – _God_ – spending an amount of time in Hell, but it was mostly drowned out by exasperation and – truth. This wasn’t the time. Tony needed to work on his ‘modifications’; and they both needed to avoid a prison sentence, or whatever the punishment for their crime was. It was hopeful that they hadn’t been charged with anything _worse_ than trespassing, despite the death of the guard – that must have been the first dragon that Tony had taken out – but these people... something was just _off_. And that wasn’t even considering that they were apparently about to summon up a soul to present evidence.

Maybe it would just be charlatanism, but... he _hoped_ it was charlatanism. Did he?

 _Running away from answers? Not your style, Rogers_. The voice in his head sounded far too much like Tony – the Tony he thought he’d known, the one who’d been crazy all along. The one who had walked through Hell and somehow come out the other side.

“Uh, excuse me?” he asked a nearby guard – not Dehua, unfortunately; Dehua was standing in the witnesses’ section. Possibly guarding Tony; it was hard to tell. The guard he’d spoken to, on the other hand, looked rather embarrassed to be addressed – was he not supposed to be speaking to anyone? Well, the judge didn’t object, and nobody was trying to arrest him some more, so he’d just have to press on. “Can you please tell me what the sentences are gonna be for Tony?”

The guard frowned harder at him, not quite looking at him, as though she wasn’t supposed to be seeing him. Just like... everyone else ignoring him. Too bad for them. “Such a question is fit only for your judge to answer.”

And here he’d been trying not to make a scene. Steve cleared his throat. The clerk’s address had been – “Honourable judge, can you tell us what the sentence is going to be for Tony?”

The judge opened his eyes, no hint of confusion on his features – so, meditating, then, or he came out of sleep combat-ready... except as a judge. Or maybe it was something else. These people looked human – but so did most of the other gods and aliens Steve had met. That didn’t mean they _were_. “The sentence may not be pronounced until the veracity of all charges has been determined.”

“Okay, but you finished trying him, it’s just me now.”

“Yeah, I’d like to know the answer to this one, too,” Tony chimed in from the sidelines.

The judge frowned at the both of them. “You committed your crimes together; thus you are judged together. Do all people from your realm behave so grossly? You have committed crimes and been granted expediency, at the cost of our own citizenry; yet your manners are base and rude, and you overall abuse our lenience.”

Well. Okay.

Steve shut up.

The Great Sage, Soen, arrived ten minutes later in cloud of perfume and a swirl of robes – or was it a dress? Steve really couldn’t tell. It looked like _some_ sort of traditional clothing, though. Her hair was ornately styled, its dark masses piled atop her head and affixed with a multitude of jewelled pins. Two young girls trailed behind her, their hands hidden in their sleeves in a way that made them look more timid than mice.

“Great Sage, we are honoured with your presence,” the judge said, rising for the first time and bowing, which apparently was the cue for the rest of the court to also bow: Steve and Tony were the only two who didn’t, although nobody tried to _make_ them  bow, either. Soen bowed back to the judge, but not as deeply. “The trial of this man depends upon testimony from a witness but recently deceased, and of such former power that he might only be raised by one as enlightened as your overreaching glory.”

Soen turned to regard Steve with dark, empty eyes. He tensed.

“What was the name of the deceased?” Soen asked the clerk, while giving a small, sharp gesture to the girls behind her. From apparently nowhere – Steve supposed it could have been up their sleeves, but he somehow doubted it – they began pulling flower petals, which they scattered upon the floor; if there was a pattern, it wasn’t one he could pick out.

“The accused was named – ” what the clerk said next made Steve’s throat hurt just listening to it, and he had to sharply remind himself of where they were. Different world, and the people here were _definitely_ not human.

 _“Ow,”_ commented Tony’s voice in his ear.

“Very well.” Soen pulled a bag out from one of her own sleeves – and to be fair, they were voluminous enough to make it plausible; he wasn’t sure how she _moved_ in that dress. She upended the bag in the middle of the scattered petals, dumping a pile of white powder onto the courtyard floor. A lot of it drifted into the air, and Steve sniffed – salt? Maybe, but there was other stuff in there, and it was more finely powdered than any table salt. Soen clapped her hands together and bowed her head, and they – waited.

And waited.

She seemed less... present, after a minute. Like she had when she’d turned that gaze upon him – but it wasn’t just her eyes, it was... all of her.

The small pile of salt was stirring; the traces of powder remaining in the air were pulled to it, but it was... _growing_. Growing really _big_ , abruptly, until it exploded upward, somehow not managing to take off the roof in the process – Steve wasn’t sure how, because he was looking straight at a dragon made of salt, and there was no way that the thing could actually fit inside the building except for how it somehow did. Colour spread upward from the petals scattered on the floor, until the dragon coiled above them all, apparently completely alive again.

“Noble guard – ” the judge’s voice did that same thing that the clerk’s had, “of the honourably slain, you are commanded to testify as to the events of your slaying.”

“So I am commanded,” said the dragon – but it said it in only one voice, one tone, not the choir that was the Chief Magistrate’s voice. And Fin Fang Foom had been the same as her; Thor had even explained how their speech worked. Was this dragon _not_ a makluan? Or was it because its body was made out of flower petals and salt?

“Did you witness this man cross over our borders?”

“Yes,” said the dragon.

“Did he cross of his own free will, or was he forced over by another?”

“I could not tell,” said the dragon. “He was carried by another man, but they appeared to be bound together. His hands were free, and he did not struggle, but when placed upon the ground he did not fly of his own power; I do not know if he could.”

“Would the fall have been quite far?”

“Very far, and I think it should have mortally injured any of his stature had his companion not flown down close to the ground before dropping him.”

“Very well, your testimony is concluded,” said the judge, and the dragon collapsed into a rain of salt that vanished before it could hit the ground. The small girls were already crouched down about Soen, picking up the petals and making them vanish back to wherever they’d come from.

Where had the _dragon_ come from? Steve stared at where the pile of salt had been and licked numb lips. It had formed a body – did that mean that its corpse was gone? He needed to stop thinking of it – he – she? – the dragon could talk, it could reason... with a voice that deep he sounded like a he. He wasn’t an it, no more than JARVIS had been.

He still needed to ask about JARVIS – _properly_ ask, about why Tony _had_ copies of him if he wasn’t willing to activate them. Hours in the car and yet it felt like Steve hadn’t had any time with his friend. Tony was a phantom, just like the dragon – dragged back from the dead, from someplace _beyond,_ and Steve wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t crumble back into salt, too. Where did souls of the dead go? Gods walked the universe – did they claim their share? It was unfair to consider that they did, considering how cruel some religions could be, including the one he’d been raised in; it was unfair to consider that they didn’t, because faith had its own value and if that was what people _wanted_ – Tony was an atheist, where would he go? Where had he gone?

 _Mother of God, Rogers, get a grip._ He glanced down at his hands. They weren’t shaking.

“We have then that the accused could have crossed of his own free will, or could have been carried despite it,” said the judge, not missing a beat. “The impartial witness did not see enough to sway; the accused cries innocence; the only fact is that he did indeed cross the border. How then to determine the honesty of a witness partial to his own cause? This is a rare situation.”

“I’ve always been partial to ‘innocent until proven guilty’,” said Tony from the sidelines. Steve shot him a grateful look, and mentally shook himself. Later. _Later_.

_It’s always later._

_...yeah, because you’re busy_ now _. Focus, damn it, if you want there to_ be _a later._

“That is entirely backwards,” the judge replied. “I am not surprised at your manners, if your people cannot even grasp simple logic! The fact of guilt or innocence is not determined by a judge’s ruling; it is the ruling that must reflect the fact.”

“If the events of one situation cannot be impartially determined,” said Soen, turning her empty gaze upon Steve again, “then it must become a trial of his character. If he is a virtuous man, then he would speak but virtuous words in court; and if he is less than that, then his honesty may be judged by the strength of his dedication to his cause.”

“This court bows to your wisdom, Great Sage,” the judge said, standing so that he could suit actions to words; and once again everyone else bowed with him. Resuming his seat, he fixed Steve with a sharp gaze. “Then how shall we judge the virtue of this man before us? Has he achieved the emptiness of the sky? The tranquility of the pond? The steadfastness of the mountain? We must determine a test for each of these things.”

“In the tradition taught to me by Her Blessed Holiness Yangchen,” said Soen, “and which I teach to my disciples, one who has achieved these things may meditate for nine days and nine nights, and the breezy air shall grow still, the silver fish shall make no ripple in the pond, and no blade may cut his skin, for the strength of stone is within him.”

Well, that killed that idea.

“Great Sage,” Steve said, “I’m a soldier – um, a warrior.” He wasn’t a soldier – not anymore. He wasn’t even an agent of SHIELD – he was just a contractor, technically a civilian. But he thought that they might not take ‘part-time spy’ very well, and it wasn’t like he actually did any spying. “I’m not _that_ virtuous. You’ll have to judge me by my cause.”

“If you are sure, then you had better describe your cause.”

“One of your people caused a plague in our realm,” said Steve. “We were told by an ally that we could claim a debt from you for it – what we want is a cure.”

“Ah,” said Soen. “And you are _very_ sure you do not wish to claim pure virtue?”

Well, not anymore... “Yes.”

“Then I am afraid your guilt is clear.” She turned to the judge. “His cause is virtuous, and his dedication profound. A man who is virtuous may follow a virtuous cause and be beset by hardship without straying from the path; but a man who is not virtuous, presented with no other path into the city, would surely fall into temptation, reason that the lesser of two evils shall suffice and thus allow himself to oppose the rule of law and be corrupted.”

“Or I could – ” the problem with trying to protest her logic, aside from the vague... _weirdness_ of it – was that no matter how she got there, she was right anyway – by the standards of these people, he was guilty of the crime they’d accused him and Tony of. Of course, if these people had any sort of _signs_ that might have given them a clue to keep out... “That’s not what – ”

“We prostrate ourselves before your intellect,” said the judge, and stood – then knelt – to suit actions to words; and once again the entire court copied him. When he had resumed his seat, he nodded to the clerk, who stood ready with a brush freshly dipped in ink. “Let the records reflect that Steve Rogers is found guilty of one count of wilful trespass, and one count of unlawful trespass.”

He gestured, and apparently this was the cue for Dehua to subtly shoo Tony back into the center of the courtyard with Steve – Tony, who didn’t look like he’d been paying any attention at _all_ to what had just happened.

“Are you even listening?” Steve asked in a hissed whisper.

_“Kinda busy programming, Steve. And machining... programming machining....”_

“For the crime of perjury, the punishment is a fine of three thousand slates. For the crime of unlawful trespass, the punishment is manual labour within the palace, to wash the floors from sunset to midnight until six thousand dawns have passed. For the crime of wilful trespass, the punishment is manual labour within the palace, to clean the windows from midnight to sunrise until nine thousand dawns have passed.”

The scribe’s brush flickered quickly over the court record, keeping pace with the judge’s words; and when he had finished, the clerk set aside the brush and stepped toward them expectantly.

“Um,” said Steve. Tony didn’t say anything. His eyes were half-closed; he looked like he was falling asleep on his feet.

“The fine is to be paid immediately,” the judge informed them, with an air of long-suffering at being forced to deal with such idiots.

“The fine of three thousand... slates?” What was _that_ supposed to mean? He couldn’t possibly mean something like a chalkboard, could he?

“Yes,” said the judge.

“What’s a slate?”

The judge stared at them; the silence in the courtyard grew more intense. By the time the judge broke it again, Steve felt like he could have swum through it. “Do you not have such currency upon you?”

“I have a black AmEx and a debit card, they tend to cover everything I need,” Tony mumbled without opening his eyes any further.

“Program faster,” Steve muttered under his breath. How long was nine thousand dawns? Had to be way more than a couple of years – and here he’d thought nine days and nine nights of meditation was bad. Apparently, that was just a warm-up. “I don’t think we have any slates, unless you can show us an example.”

“If you need an example then you surely do not have any,” the judge agreed. “Very well; then I charge you each with one count of contempt for this lawful court acting in the name of the king; and as you have confessed you shall not pay the fine, then I must find you immediately guilty. For the crime of contempt of this lawful court, the punishment is death by beheading, to be carried out by sunset upon this day.” He eyed them both. “The punishments for your other crimes shall have to wait until you have served your time in the underworld and returned to life. And as criminals cannot appear before the king, your petition shall also have to wait, and dishonour the both of you in the waiting; you have failed your lords. Let this be a lesson to you not to grab greedily at responsibilities meant for your betters.”

Killing somebody – didn’t even get them charged. But not having the money to pay a court fine got them _beheading_?

These people were crazy!

“A king may always listen to a Great Sage, however,” said Soen, while Steve was still trying to formulate some sort of reply. “Though the sage might often rue how little the king learns in the process. I shall investigate this matter of the plague, that the dishonour brought by these two criminals shall not taint our own kingdom; for as they sought the lesser of two evils, and in their arrogance chose the greater evil of obstructing this realm’s harmonious law, neither must the people of this realm seek also a lesser evil; for it is still evil, and may lead to greater. Tell me, Steve Rogers, what person of our realm did yours wrong?”

What the hell was the first part of that speech supposed to mean? She was speaking English, but the twist in her logic... or maybe it was the starting point. He didn’t know. The last sentence was the only thing that made any sense. “Um. It was a dragon named Fin Fang Foom.”

The courtyard... nobody _tittered,_ but somehow the following ashamed silence managed to give off the same impression of nervous embarrassment.

Soen blinked empty eyes at him. “That is a ridiculous name.”

Shit. “It’s the only name we were told.”

“Whomever told you must certainly have gotten it wrong,” said Soen. “No one of this realm would bear such a name willingly; and if they bore it unwillingly, I would have heard.”

“But it was through Allspeech. Unless – it was an alias,” Steve said, and wanted to hit himself. Shit. Why the _hell_ had he not thought – Soen was right, it was a completely ridiculous name. “That’s all we know,” he said helplessly. “I saw him, he was a green dragon. Our ally said he was Fin Fang Foom, an exile of Maklu.”

“Maklu!” exclaimed Soen; and everyone else in the courtyard made a bowing motion that, different as it was from sketching a cross over their chests, was unmistakably a gesture of faith. “You are pilgrims to Heaven, then – poor pilgrims indeed,” she noted, “untutored and unwise, but the heavenly accords make some allowances for those who seek that most righteous path.”

This wasn’t Maklu.

Of _course_ it wasn’t Maklu.

“We were trying to get to Maklu,” said Steve, not quite managing to keep his irritation at this whole damn _day_ under wraps. “We’d still like to get to Maklu. If you’ll let us go and point us in the right direction, I swear to God we’ll never come back here.”

“Great Sage,” said the judge, “while the laws call for leniency and mercy toward those who undertake the path to enlightenment, these men have no passports and no priest to vouch for them or to guide them. Without such they are less likely to go _anywhere_ except a prison somewhere else, upon another crime, and in that case we should have failed in our sacred duty to our neighbours to keep order and peace within our own lands.”

“This is true,” said Soen. “But dedication may propel a pilgrim where virtue would make a martyr; and obstructing another’s path to enlightenment is, if a lesser evil, still evil.” She turned to face the two young girls who were her apprentices. “Tell me, my disciples, how do you think their fitness should be judged?”

The girl on the right squeaked, blushed, and then composed herself, obviously giving the matter her full and very grave attention. The girl on the left kindly ignored this byplay, concentrating no less hard than her fellow student – and looking no less doubtful. Finally, after a full minute had passed, in a dead silence wherein not a single person in the courtyard had coughed, shifted in tiredness, or – so it felt like – allowed their attention to wander, the girl on the left suggested, “The path of enlightenment must be open to all. Should they convert to Buddhism and take the vow to seek heaven, then that should be sufficient, even if for a time they must be disciples without a master.”

“So you do learn, although you must be quicker with the answer in future,” said Soen, and both girls bowed to her. She turned back to Steve and Tony. “Well?

 _No!_ Steve almost said before he could even think about it.

Then, _Why not?_

Because he wasn’t – faith wasn’t something to just _switch_ , from one being to another – not for something as low as a ruse. Not even if, in the end, they were likely all come down to the same thing: a greater Good, and works toward it, be they done in the name of the Devil or any other evil... if there was a common ground, how much of a pretense would it even be? Besides, he wasn’t Catholic anymore, no matter what that instinctual gut-clench felt like. And granted, he didn’t know much about Buddhism, but it seemed a very enlightened religion – though if it was practised by these people, maybe he ought to reconsider that opinion.

“No thanks,” said Tony, now sounding awake for the first time, and Steve turned to look at him in surprise.

 _“Hey-remember-that-whole-bit-about-calling-names-gets-attention?”_ Tony’s voice came out over the comm. too quick – fast enough that unenhanced humans wouldn’t have been able to separate the words. And, considering – okay, Tony had a point.

He didn’t agree in the Old Testament’s god, even before that almost shattering blow to his faith. But if that god could be as petty as the Old Testament would make it sound – yeah, even the pretense of conversion, to _anything_ , was a pretty dumb idea for more than moral reasons.

He needed to talk to a priest. Too bad he had yet to find one with a security clearance as high as his own. Leo was good at counselling, but... it felt like faith was all just intellectual to him.

First, though, Steve had a death sentence to worry about. And a zombie apocalypse, _still_.

“Hmm,” said the judge. “Dedicated enough to thwart the law, but not dedicated enough to convert to the holy path. I wonder at the truth as you have presented it to us. Regardless, the accused have shown that they are unwilling to commit to seeking Heaven, and they must therefore feel the full weight of mortal law: and that is that they shall be beheaded before sunset upon this day. Take them away to the execution yard. This court is dismissed.”

 _“Ah, shit,”_ said Tony in Steve’s ear, and Steve was pretty sure that it was never not going to be unsettling that Tony’s lips weren’t moving when he was talking. _“I need more time than that!”_

“Wait, just like that? Don’t we get a last meal?” Steve protested – loudly. Dehua and the other guard who had been watching over their prison had stepped forward again as escorts – but everybody else was just leaving, except for Soen and her disciples. These people had sent out a whole slew of guards – and _dragons_ – to bring them in, and now they were leaving them alone with just two guards?

Though if ‘Sage’ meant ‘Sorcerer’... Soen had raised the dead, or at least made a pretty good imitation of it. Steve added that into the tactical calculations and reshuffled the priority of his targets. Dehua was closest, and he and his fellow guard’s skills were unknown, but Soen...

“What use would a meal be to one who is soon to die?” asked Dehua, sounding both curious and annoyed. “It would simply be more weight for your gravediggers to need to carry. Come; the execution yard is this way.”

The courtyard was now empty except for them, Soen and the two girls watching with large, fathomless eyes from their position near the front of the room. The two girls – wizards in training? Kids could be legitimate threats, but ones that had to be accounted for defensively; bad enough if he had to kill their teacher in front of them.

“If we’re being nice to our gravediggers, then I should mention I need to use the washroom.” Whoops. That had come out a bit snider than he’d intended.

“Witnessing such cravenness is embarrassing,” Dehua said crossly. “If you will not walk like proper adults, then we shall truss you up and carry you.”

“Proper adults? We’re not the ones executing people over a fine,” Steve said, crossing his arms over his chest and doing his best to _loom_. He wished that the guards weren’t both wearing those strange helmets; their armour was bulky enough that between it all, he only had verbal cues to go on – and these people were _weird._ They’d already been caught wrong-footed too many times.

“The harmony of law must be maintained.”

“The _purpose_ of law is justice; and this is a great injustice.”

“The judge has spoken!” Dehua’s fellow guard spoke up, her voice full of indignation. “You took your chance and turned it away.”

“Because I believe in freedom of choice, and freedom of religion is part of that,” Steve said calmly, trying not to show how much the words felt like a mockery. Everything he was saying was true – but it felt like he was just tossing spaghetti against the ceiling, waiting to see what would stick. If he couldn’t figure out what they had in common, how could he get through to them? “It’s a right beyond what a mortal court can enforce. And because I _also_ don’t think I could just convert at the drop of a hat. How can you ask somebody to give up everything they’ve believed in all their lives? I can’t do that and _mean_ it. Your judge – your Sage – ” he turned to stare at the still-silent, still-watching Soen, “set me an impossible task, call me a coward when I refuse, and then sentence us to death. If that’s what your law calls for, then your law is unjust – it’s _wrong_.”

“You are as strange as every name you have spoken,” said Soen, silencing whatever the guards might have been about to say in return. She spoke very slowly – which was fine by Steve; Tony needed him to stall, so he’d stall. “You fear death beyond all reason – I can see it coiling about you. And yet you face it without trembling, indicating great bravery. Your realm must be very far away indeed, to have so lost the light of Heaven’s teachings; I begin to wonder if you are not all mad, there.”

He borrowed her trick, slowing down his own words; if the guards were unwilling to actually interrupt them, then he’d take full advantage of it. “I hope – I _pray_ – that there’s something better waiting on the other side of life. If Tony and I die, if we fail here, then a lot more people will die. Maybe even our entire realm. Seven billion people – I don’t know if that number means anything to you; hell, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know that I get it, not really. Every loss of an innocent life is a tragedy. How can you – ” his throat seized up. The entire world, gone – he had to think of it as _one_ world; seven billion people was just _too much_. “Every death will be a black mark against your law. It’ll tarnish – it’ll wither. And when you need it to protect you most, your sacred law will _shatter_. There’s no virtue in an unjust law – only tyranny and suffering.”

His own arguments were breaking him.

“Everyone dies,” said Soen. “Except for those who have discovered the secret precepts of Immortality, and entered Heaven still living – but even that is a form of death. Families and close friends mourn, and upon the great holy days, they burn incense in memory and may converse with those fallen to learn of their status in the afterlife, and if there is anything that the living may offer up as a sacrifice to heaven to aid their loved one in sooner receiving reincarnation. Even realms die, and are reborn to be populated anew. This is the great cycle of the World and Heaven, the sacred and holy order that keeps all within balance. Loss is a thing to mourn; the absence of a friend may be a sorrow; but the path itself is one of joy and celebration, of learning and growing toward the ultimate virtue. Do not fear death, Steve Rogers; take your place within the dominion of God with acceptance and peace.”

He couldn’t tell if she was trying to lecture, scold, or comfort; and as he tried to sort through her words, Dehua and the other guard moved forward, raising their spear-like weapons enough to threaten. Threaten – with what, death? But if that was just the flip-side of life to these people – he didn’t get it.

Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. Soen was telling him _something_ – he needed to work with that. If they could meet each other half-way... “If you say that’s how it works here, in this realm – this _world_ – then I believe you,” he said, raising his hands. She’d summoned a spirit into salt and petals; he didn’t think this was just conflicting _faiths_. “But that’s not how it works in ours. When people die, they move on – I hope to somewhere happy, but I don’t _know_ , because we don’t get to talk to them again like you do. They’re not reborn, and they don’t come back. They’re _gone_.”

“You paint the picture of a cruel world indeed,” Soen observed. “Yet God is infinite. You may not understand Heaven’s great plan, but to rebel against it is nonetheless evil; your time would be better spent in contemplation, in the search for understanding.” She shook her head. “I would that you had been willing to convert. Even if you might fail to reach Heaven, I think the journey would teach you much; but perhaps you simply are not destined to walk the western road in this lifetime.”

It wasn’t working.

There was no way they could possibly understand each other.

“I’m all about the search for understanding,” Tony said, opening his eyes just as the faceplate of the armour slid down and shut. _“Especially understanding how to prevent people from disintegrating my stuff. Steve – grab on. Great work stalling.”_

“Anytime,” Steve said, his scowl half-hearted as he stepped forward to throw his arms around Tony.

“What are you doing?” demanded Dehua. “Our dragon guards and sky sorcerers shall bring you in again if you – ”

Steve lost the rest of the words as all the colours of the worlds came to life, scarlet and rust and alabaster, viridian and shimmering gold, the hues so subtle he could drown in them and never long for breath.

Only Soen was different. Her dress was _life_ , so many shades that Steve felt vertigo sweep over him just from looking at her, but her eyes – they were as dark and as empty as a starless night. There was no hunger in them, but her gaze pinned him as strongly as Tony’s mag-lock, and it remained locked on them, even when Tony kicked in the repulsors and lifted them from the ground. Dehua and the guard were shouting, clapping their hands together in a manner reminiscent of the judge’s trick, except how it wasn’t doing anything. The two young disciples just looked confused. But Soen watched them, staring straight through the cloak, and Steve felt her gaze upon them even as Tony gunned it skyward and tore through the rice-paper roof.

The expanse of blue sky above knocked all the air out of him – he’d never known a colour could have so many variations come together so perfectly smooth. It was only with a wrench of willpower that he forced himself to breathe, to stop gawping and pay attention: this wasn’t a couple of bored reporters sitting on his front step. Sure, they could take care of themselves against any individual soldier – and Tony seemed to have figured out a way to keep them from just dusting his armour – but if these people could send an _army_.  

A minute passed as they looped away from the mountains, further into the rolling foothills that gave way to enormous worked fields. Smaller settlements spread out, away from the white road, which now ran along a river twice the width of the Hudson; it had come down from further north in the mountains than the road had. Or at least, Steve _thought_ it was north – but he realized with a jolt that it might not be. They were flying faintly toward the sun, which was maybe a hand’s length further down than it had been when they’d been arrested, but was still pretty high in the sky – but what if this world rotated in a different direction? What if the sun rose in the north? Would a compass – he needed to stop over-thinking this. They were flying toward the afternoon sun, that made it west. With that decision made, Steve felt his internal sense of direction shift back into something approximating normal.

There was no sign of pursuit from the city rapidly dwindling behind them. Maybe, with luck, they’d be able to get outside of that kingdom’s borders – however they were defined – and wouldn’t be pursued over them.

But the technology to build a portal home wasn’t going to be sitting around in a farmer’s field. Unless Tony could ‘reprogram’ some more of extremis, or whatever the heck his armour was made of – but if he could, then he’d hardly have an enormous secret portal machine built in a mine in Ohio, now would he?

“We need to find another city,” Steve said, shifting to protect his face more from the wind and closing his eyes – but even the darkness behind his eyelids looked like... _more_.

 _“Uhuh. And do what when we get there?”_ Tony’s answer was clipped, short.

Trying to keep track of what was going through Tony’s head was exhausting. Had he been this mercurial before he’d gotten extremis? When he’d been crazy and paranoid and Steve hadn’t noticed? Or was this how he _normally_ was?

 _“We need to figure something out before we get there,”_ Tony said grudgingly, and they began a gentle descent toward – Steve looked up – another set of hills. The tops of them had enough tree cover that if they uncloaked, they probably wouldn’t be noticed from the sky right away. There was a village just a few several miles further, but the farms were mostly situated on the other side. They coasted down in a circle, and Tony released the maglock, letting Steve jump down on his own before he touched down – but not in his trademark three-point landing.

“Are you okay?” The words were out before Steve even realized what he was about to say.

The faceplate flipped up. “Sure, Steve, I’m fine,” said Tony, his smile sharp-edged. “I’m a complete idiot, but I’m fine.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong about that... “What the hell possessed you to try to make counterfeit passports with _extremis_?” Steve asked, and immediately regretted it – he shouldn’t have asked until he could make it a question, not an _accusation_. One was conducive to teamwork and cooperation; the other wasn’t. “I didn’t mean – ”

“I was scanning them, Steve, I already knew we weren’t in Maklu, though I’d hoped they might give us directions,” Tony sighed, holding up gauntleted hands. “Still pretty stupid – I should know not to underestimate alien tech...”

Steve didn’t like the way _that_ trailed off. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That bridges are impressive and so’s extremis,” Tony said, now exasperated. “What’s your problem, Steve?”

“ _My_ problem?” Just when he’d thought that maybe Tony _wasn’t_ being an idiot – “ _My_ problem is you’re still not telling me anything! Where the hell is JARVIS? What were the scans you ran? What other _technology_ have you run into? I told you _my_ whole damn story because hell, I figured you were trusting me – but you’re not! I’m walking in blind and I don’t know a damn thing, because you can’t be bothered to tell me that we’re not even in Maklu before I have to find it out from that creepy sage!” 

“I am telling you things,” said Tony – calmer than Steve, almost creepily so – he’d sounded irritated a moment ago, but now it was like the words he was saying had no relation to the expression he was wearing, a disconnect that scraped further at Steve’s raw nerves. “Steve, I didn’t plan for this to happen.”

“That’s the problem with doing it on your own,” Steve said, folding his arms across his chest. “Jesus, Tony, I don’t care how much of a genius you are, everybody misses things. But every time I think I’m getting through to you – ” he shook his head. “Back in that other reality – when you came and got me – it’s like talking to a brick wall.”

“Steve...”

Tony wasn’t supposed to look hurt – he shouldn’t get to feel hurt, damn it.

“You won’t even tell me where the hell you’ve been for the past two months,” Steve said, feeling very tired. Too many battles, and he’d been up with Bruce the night before; he should have been paying attention to his own reserves. Or maybe he’d just forgotten how draining dealing with Tony could be. He oughtta be fine for another day or so; this was probably just the adrenaline crash. “Science and upgrades and programming tricks you know I won’t understand, sure. _Where_ you got the new armour – how you built yourself another secret facility, _why_ you built it – ” he paused waiting for Tony to say something, to fill in one of the damn blanks without having it dragged out of him – but Tony was silent. “I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead, SHIELD thought I was crazy – hell, _I_ was starting to think I was crazy – ” and that was an understatement, because for all of Fury’s mysterious, uncalled for belief aside, after that radiation test he’d had nothing but doubt.

“So did I.”

“What?”

Tony was staring fixedly at an otherwise unremarkable fallen tree-branch. “I thought I was crazy. And dead. Um, crazy while dead – I mean, it’s a reasonable assumption; I’ve seen the afterlife and it sucks. Lots of grey, occasional over-sharing dead chick – ”

“Tony.” Steve was almost afraid to interrupt him – but if Tony went off on another damn tangent and ended up saying nothing, then Steve might just give in to the impulse to strangle him. Even if it was – Hell.

“Have you ever felt like your brain’s not really yours?”

This was about extremis, then. “We’re on another world,” Steve said, taking a step forward. “You don’t have to go – you _can’t_ go anywhere near the rest of them, not right now. Your brain’s your own – ”

“Not what I meant – JARVIS, he thinks differently. Thought differently.”

Had Tony seen the logs where JARVIS had explained that to Steve? The thought of Tony watching what had happened in those awful days when Steve hadn’t just wondered if he was dead, but had _known_ – an angry knot of humiliation curdled in his gut. Steve forced it down. “Yeah.” An idea came to him – “If you’re having – difficulties – ” difficulties with his brain being in two places, which didn’t make any sense at all, “ – could he help you?”

Tony looked taken aback, like this idea hadn’t occurred to him. But he shook his head, instead walking over to one of the not-quite-familiar trees and sliding down to sit against its trunk. The armour looked ridiculous, with him posed like that – ridiculous, and slightly forlorn. “Yeah, he probably could,” Tony said, and huffed a laugh. “But I can’t risk him. Not yet.”

“Why not?” Steve shook his head. “Why make a copy of him in the first place? If it’s like – keeping somebody brain-dead, asleep in a coma – ”

“It’s not, Steve, the comparison only goes so far,” Tony interrupted him. “He agreed to it willingly.”

“Then why is it a risk?”

“I think – and I’ve seen evidence in other universes – that AIs are being targeted,” said Tony. “They’re being killed, or they go insane – but there’s way too many of them going insane.” He shook his head. “Okay, some didn’t have the best childhoods – ” Steve looked up sharply at the sudden loathing in Tony’s voice, “ – but there’s way too many of them that were loved, and they’re – statistically, there should be some that are making it out okay, and there isn’t. Someone’s interfering.” The dark look on his face spelled out exactly who he thought that was.

“Why?” asked Steve, swinging his arms to try to work some of the tension out of his muscles. The new uniform flowed with him, allowing him a much greater range of motion than his old suit – something he’d noticed while fighting, earlier, but hadn’t really had the chance to appreciate.

“Beats me,” said Tony, far too flippant and bitter.

Steve shook his head. He was letting Tony get off track – not hard. There was so much that Tony hadn’t told him, Steve was beginning to think he could wander off in random directions for the next year and still be telling him something that Steve should have known earlier. “Why did you think you were crazy?” He froze, tensing. “You didn’t actually _start_ going crazy again – ”

“No, my hatchet job was fine,” Tony said, and Steve was pretty sure nothing he’d said had deserved that much venom in response – except that it wasn’t directed at him, he realized, just as he opened his mouth to protest. He shut it again. “No, it – you’re going to laugh at me.”

Of all the – “What?”

“It was the internet,” Tony said, and he sounded embarrassed and half-awed and – half-terrified, which made Steve tense up again, because if the most technologically advanced man on the planet was terrified of Earth’s own technology – had aliens done something to it? The internet was everywhere – Steve loved it, loved having all that information at his fingertips, on his phone, always available: pictures, maps, the news, _people_. Connections. Losing that would be a tragedy. “I can’t even describe it, it was – I was in _bits_. Literally. And bits of myself, there’d be a – thought, and then something else would complete it, but – ”

“You were – in the internet,” Steve said slowly. _It’s a trip,_ Tony had said before.

“Either that or hell,” Tony said, almost _dreamily_. The hair on the back of Steve’s neck would have stood up, if it weren’t plastered to his skin by his suit. “Everyone dying, all my fault – numbers falling out of place – and I couldn’t – it was like being surrounded by giants, everything was bigger, I was only in little pieces – scattered. I was part of the pattern – but no one bit of me could see it...”

“Tony,” Steve said sharply – and for a moment he was half-afraid that Tony wouldn’t look at him, or that he would, but he wouldn’t be _seeing_ him – he’d be gone, someplace that Steve didn’t really understand, and what the hell had Tony even been doing uploading himself to the internet in the first place – but Tony looked at him, clear-eyed, and Steve bit down on a sigh of relief.

“Sorry,” Tony apologized. “I know. I should have – I didn’t really think it was real.” He sighed, thunking his head back against his tree. “Stupid, hey? Took me weeks just to figure out I was actually a person– I got back to my body a few days ago. And shit, I should’ve – being the internet was weird.” He grinned; too bright and cheery. “I should’ve seen that one coming. Maybe I picked up a virus or something, and that’s why we’re not in Maklu.” His tone was only half-joking.

A few days didn’t make sense. “But that mine...” Steve felt his eyes narrow.

“I didn’t lie to you, Steve, I swear,” Tony said quickly – earnestly. Apparently he could make the same jump. “It wasn’t there before – Shenzhen was the only one. But, hey, the internet – I had the backup armour, I had fabrication facilities, robots – everything gets hooked up online these days, you wouldn’t believe. Moving things around – ” he opened and closed the fingers on one hand, the metal moving so smoothly that he might as well have been wearing a glove made of cloth – and not thick cloth, either. “Okay, not like poking with one of these babies – these have sensors _everywhere_ , spherical vision’s great – but, like the Mark III or so. I could poke a hole through concrete without thinking too much, and not even feel it – it wasn’t real.” He shook his head, shoulders drawing in again – and the armour allowed even that movement, transmitted it loud and clear. “I didn’t think it was real. I wasn’t _capable_ of thinking it was real. My brain was in literal pieces, it wasn’t – it took a while to link things up.” He took a shuddering breath. “And then I realized it _was_ real.”  

“Okay,” said Steve.

“Please believe me.” Tony looked up, eyes only, head still too low and drawn in – Steve shook his head, and Tony looked crestfallen.

“No, I believe you.” It was... Steve wasn’t sure he really got what Tony meant, but it didn’t sound... sane. “Why didn’t you just tell me the first times I asked?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d come.” Tony’s lips twitched up on one side. “I needed to go. I needed you with me. If you thought I was still crazy – ”

“I know you’re crazy.” Steve scrubbed his hands over his face. “We’re all crazy.” Everything had gone insane.

“Not you,” said Tony, and – he couldn’t –

\- the amount of _belief_ packed into those two words –

Steve swallowed, and looked away. He’d deal with it later. Right now –

“Okay.” Steve paused. “Thank you for telling me.”

Tony smiled crookedly, like he could read all the frustration that Steve was trying to keep locked away from the forefront of his thoughts.

“We need to decide what we’re doing from here. We don’t know where Maklu is from here – ”

“Probably west,” said Tony.

“ – other than that,” Steve amended. “But a pilgrimage makes it sound pretty far...”

“Pretty far if you go on foot. We can fly.”

“And get caught by more dragons, unless you can keep us invisible the whole way.” And that was another concern – Tony might be immortal, _and_ have extremis, but the suit still had an arc reactor in it, which meant that Tony probably did, too. That wasn’t something Steve wanted to take chances around. “Can you?”

“Probably not,” Tony admitted. “When I said it still chews through power quicker than the NIF, I... may have been understating the situation.”

Steve tried to steer the conversation back on track. “So how long can it last?”

“Another half-hour.” Tony stretched out his legs in front of him and crossed one jet-boot over the other. “...not so great, I know.”

“Okay, so we need to know where we shouldn’t be flying so we can go around those areas – we need a map.” Steve shrugged. “There’re villages all over the place – we can ask the locals at the nearest one for a map, or directions to Maklu. It sounds like they’re pretty in favour of pilgrims who aren’t wanted criminals.”

“And the passports?” Tony sounded doubtful. “I reconfigured the armour to withstand a straight burst, but if I’m handing them over for inspection...”

“We ask very quickly, then,” Steve said, and let himself grin a bit. This was what Steve had _done_ during the War – walk in, grab intel, walk out. Replace ‘walk’ with ‘run’, ‘sneak’, or ‘swagger’, depending on the town or fortress that the Commandoes were targeting. Occasionally, blow stuff up. Sure, they were on an alien world, but – well, Hydra’s weapons had been pretty damn alien, too... had _actually_ been based on an alien artefact, as it turned out. He’d figure it out – that was what the Commandoes had been _for_.

“Right.” Tony hauled himself to his feet, still looking tired; Steve flipped himself up and got a dirty look for showing off. “You want to lead the way, Captain, or should I keep playing taxi?”

“The way you go on about public transportation, you might as well.”

Tony barked a laugh, the latter end of it getting cut off as the faceplate slammed down again. The maglock kicked in, the world grew brighter, and they lifted off.


	3. The Monk Tripitaka

It was only a short flight, over in less than a minute; Steve had taken longer ones hanging out of planes or helicopters... well, planes back in the day; helicopters were from recent weeks. They landed out behind a building where no person or security camera could see – at least, no security camera that Tony had managed to spot – and uncloaked. The feeling of disappointment that accompanied the dull colours of reality was just as sharp as it had been before, and Steve shook his head hard to clear it.

Tony’s armour collapsed into normal clothes and a backpack, and Steve looked down at himself. He hadn’t seen any laundry lines on the way in – often the Commandoes’ first port of call, when they were out far enough to be cut off from a friendly base. “Damn it,” he muttered.

“Take off the outer layer and turn it inside-out,” Tony suggested, looking pleased with himself – and, sure, okay. Steve had to admire the effect – inside-out, with the cowl down, the top half of his suit didn’t look too different from the black jacket that Tony was sporting, and the pants could have passed for normal in New York. The boots were still distinctive, but he’d probably pass. His shield, though...

Tony solved that problem by spreading some of the silvery metallic substance of extremis over it, and it faded into a non-descript brown – once Steve slung it on his back, it could have been mistaken for a backpack. Tony also dabbed the stuff on the cuts made in the outer uniform by the arrows – true to his earlier claims, they were already knitting back together slowly on their own, but Tony looked personally offended by their presence. “You could have mentioned something earlier,” he muttered at Steve, but Steve found himself more distracted by the way the nano-stuff seemed to make the damage just _vanish_. Nifty stuff, that.

 _Shame about the side-effects,_ he thought sourly.

It wasn’t a great disguise. True, they looked different than they had in the city: Steve hadn’t taken off his cowl in there, and Tony hadn’t removed his helmet, so if it came down to a description of what they were wearing then they’d be fine. Steve had gone into plenty of Nazi towns in worse disguises – and been chased out of them, at times, but he’d gotten out alive. _After_ , though, might be a different story: while the people here, like Asgardians, seemed to be taller on average than humans – tall enough to make both their heights unremarkable – their features were different. Their hair was going to stand out, especially Tony’s; he’d gone with a ridiculously bright shade of blonde. Their complexion, eyes, and clothing all marked them as foreigners. If they were being hunted, then their pursuers would hear of this. And then they’d know that they were going west.

Well, it wasn’t like they had much more than a vague hope lying westward, Steve reflected. If they picked up that they were being followed, then they could make a break north or south, try looking for another city in one of those directions instead.

“Their communications are weird,” Tony said, his eyes searching the sky. “Not a lot of traffic I can pick up... I don’t _think_ they’ve heard about us, though.”

The town wasn’t large enough to have a permanent market, but there was a larger-than-most central building which was topped in the same style as the city’s pagodas and dressed in rich silks: either government, or religion, and if word hadn’t already gotten out about them, then either would be their best bet for finding out which direction they needed to go. As they approached, however, one screen door was flung aside; and a young man wearing a coarse, un-dyed robe – more of a wrap, really – was thrown out onto the white stone road, bringing with him the stench of rancid sweat and old urine.

And blood: dried, but present in worrying quantity.

“Beggar! Be gone from here, and don’t come back until you’ve had a dunk in a river!” cried a voice from within – evidently, the woman who had done the throwing. “Mind it’s downstream from the town, too!”

The poor guy began picking himself up, making it as far as his knees before collapsing into great, blubbering tears. He raised his hands to cover his face, and in doing so revealed streaks of dried blood all down his front and one arm, splashing over onto the sleeve as well.

 _Not your world, not your world_ –

“Sir, are you okay?” Steve asked, switching off acknowledgement of his nose and jogging over. He gave the guy a more thorough once-over as he got nearer – it didn’t seem to be _his_ blood, though, or if it was, he must have had a healing factor to rival Steve’s. That didn’t mean that he hadn’t been though hell, though – he looked up as Steve approached, and his eyes rolled in fright.

“Oh please, do not beat me, I am going!” he wept, scrambling to his feet and managing to lose one of his sandals in the process, and then hopping about awkwardly until he could get it re-tied. “I am sorry – I am _going_ –”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Steve said, hands up and open, empty. “I can tell you’ve had a rough time – maybe we can help.”

 _“Steve, are you_ serious?” Tony’s voice hissed over the comm. _“We’ve got enough problems to deal with already.”_

Steve ignored him. Sure, they had _big_ problems – the entire Earth was counting on them, even if it didn’t know it. Back in the War they had plenty of big problems. But right now, they didn’t even know who to ask about directions – the locals didn’t seem all that friendly. They could afford some kindness.

 _“We don’t have time to help every down-on-his-luck sob story – ”_ so Tony had picked up on the blood, too, _“ – who just happens to...”_ he trailed off. Maybe he’d noticed Steve was ignoring him. When he spoke next, his ‘voice’ on the comm. was thoughtful. _“Or. Okay. I guess we’re doing this.”_

The young man’s sobs had quieted, and he was now staring at Steve with a mix of fear and hope. “Please, I have not seen kindness for days. I was beset upon the road by ogres, and – ” a fresh gush of tears threatened, “ – my disciples have been eaten, and so has my horse, and  all of my supplies pillaged; I have but my sack and nothing else, and even with my passport no one will even _look_ at me, and I have no money for the bathhouse, or for food – ” and he broke into sobs again.

 _Ogres_? Was he being literal? God knew it was possible, with everything else they’d seen.

“Well, we don’t have any money either, unless they accept AmEx.” The second part, muttered in an undertone, earned a quiet snicker from Tony. “But, here – ” Steve dug out one of the ration bars from his belt. “It tastes weird, but it’s filling.”

The man fell on it like he hadn’t seen food for days, ripping open the wrapper with filthy hands – Steve could practically _feel_ Tony cringing behind him. “Oh thank you, thank you – ” he licked crumbs from his fingers and fell to his knees. “I am in your debt – thank you – you have reminded me that kindness can exist even in this imperfect mortal world.”

“Thanks aren’t necessary,” Steve said firmly. “Though, if you happen to know how to get to Maklu – ”

“You are making the pilgrimage to Heaven?” – and if the guy’s eyes got any wider, they were going to fall out of his head. “That is where I am going! Or trying to go.” For that matter, if he kept crying at such volume, he’d need to drink some water before he became dehydrated. Steve thought about frowning at Tony for ditching his water bottle, but he didn’t want to upset the guy any _more_. The guy looked like he might faint if Steve scowled in his general direction. “But the road is so long! I knew it would be dangerous, and treacherous, but I didn’t think every unholy demon would be waiting for me upon it.”

“Well, as it happens, we’re trying to get there, and we can fly,” said Tony, stepping forward. “With ‘we’ meaning ‘me and I can carry my friend, and if you take a bath first and point us in the right direction then I can carry you too’.”

“But you can’t get to Maklu by flying,” the man sobbed, looking utterly disheartened once again.

“You can’t?” Steve glanced over at Tony, who had gone still, his face blank.

A hiccough; “N-no, the states for the Passage to Heaven exist only in the first harmonic along the Great Roads.”

“ – Son of a bitch,” Tony swore, clothing flashing over to gold and red, and in the next heartbeat he was sky borne – and then gone, leaving Steve staring after empty space. At least he’d cloaked himself from the dragons – or Steve _hoped_ that was what had happened –

“Tony!” he snapped into his comm.

 _“Back in a – ”_ There was a hiss of static.

 _Damnit, Tony._ “What did you mean?” Steve turned back to the only other source of answers. “If we fly, what happens?” The guy sobbed – Steve resisted the urge to shake him. Useful for hysterics, but given what the guy had been though, this might well be shellshock, in which case attempts to snap him out of it would just be cruel. “My friend just flew up – _where has he gone?”_

“Straight up. Only the l-lateral spacefolds are d-different at heights,” the man sniffled, but he was now starting to look confused, like this was something that Steve really ought to know – like how two plus two was four. Personally, Steve preferred Thor’s explanations – at least Thor could understand _why_ they didn’t get something; this guy looked like he was wondering if the only nice person in the vicinity was just nice because he was a total dunce.

 _“Shit, he’s right,”_ said Tony over comms. _“There’s – Jesus, this is weird. If I wasn’t looking for it I’d never pick it up...”_

Steve turned away to stare at the sky, but he couldn’t see anything. “Can you get back down here?” he asked tersely.

 _“Chill, Cap, now that I know about it I can compensate for it,”_ said Tony, and Steve would have sworn that he calculated it to _just the right level_ of nonchalance to make Steve grind his teeth. His next words were in a grimmer tone, though: _“Though if I didn’t have a computer in my brain, I admit keeping the calculations straight long enough to navigate anywhere would be tricky. Explains why there’s no comm. chatter about us, though – we’re nowhere near that city anymore.”_ A low whistle. _“Earth is closer to Mars than we are to it.”_

It took NASA nine months to send a spaceship from Earth to Mars. How big _was_ this world? Or was it a bunch of worlds? How had they not noticed changing worlds? It had been pretty damn obvious all the other times Steve had gotten yanked from one to another. “Can you compensate enough to get us to Maklu?”

 _“Let me check.”_ The comm. went silent, without even the static anymore.

“Tony?” Steve raised a hang to his ear – a stupid gesture, one he knew he didn’t need, but he’d never been on enough undercover ops – not in modern times – to break it. “Tony!”

There was no response. What did that mean? Tony hadn’t gone supersonic overhead; they’d have heard the boom. If he’d moved – but how long would it take a radio signal to get from Earth to Mars? Had they just been separated? No, Tony had said he could compensate – or was _trying_ to compensate –

“I’m sorry,” wailed Smelly – Steve felt instantly bad for thinking of him that way, but the heightened adrenaline made the stink worse. “Please don’t be angry at me!”

“I’m not angry at _you_ , son,” Steve said, and, “ _Tony!”_

 _“ – back now,”_ and there was a roar of repulsors as Tony dropped into visibility and out of the sky, his landing pose three-point-perfect, the helmet melting away.

“Excuse us for a moment,” Steve told the now-only-snuffling young man. No point in frightening him further. Then he grabbed Tony by the arm and bodily dragged him about fifteen feet away, hissing,

“Do you ever stop to _think_ – ”

“ – what? I got _back_ – ”

“ – just running off, what if you hadn’t been able to come _back_?”

“It hasn’t even been thirty seconds to you, what’re you – look, genius! Supercomputer in head! Able to fly a dogfight and solve P vs NP at the same time, _it wasn’t –_ ”

“Yeah, that’s how we wound up _here!_ ”

“ _That_ wasn’t – ” Tony started indignantly, and then deflated. “Okay, fair point.”

“I get it, you see things and it takes time to explain it to the rest of us,” Steve said, forcing himself to speak evenly. “But if you run off and get yourself killed, _I can’t come and get you_. And that leaves me stuck here, too. Think about _that_ , will you?” Because arguing about how they would _both_ be safer – arguing about the purpose of teamwork and its place in modern warfare – wasn’t going to get through Tony’s head, he knew it wasn’t.

Tony had sobered; he met Steve’s eyes squarely, but there was shame in his own when he did. “Right. Another fair point.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry, Steve. I guess I’ve gotten used to working alone.”

“Well, get used to having a team again.” Steve breathed in and out, a huffing sigh to clear his lungs, and turned back to his... rescuee? He wasn’t quite sure what the guy was – although at least he seemed to be calmer than he had before – which wasn’t what Steve had expected. They were behaving badly, he knew that.

“He’s right, unfortunately,” Tony said quietly. “The roads have a different field around them – they’re... tunnels through spacetime? That’s a shitty comparison. I don’t know how to explain it without a lot of math... but he’s right. I’m not sure even flying _close_ to the road would work; the readings I got show it drops off so quick I’m pretty sure there needs to be periodic contact to renew the mobile field, and the period’s not long.”

That... wasn’t good. If Steve understood it right. He rubbed at his forehead. “We could stay in radio contact in the fighting before the city, and you were flying around then.”

“You weren’t on the road, though,” Tony said. “And the road’s key, if we’re going to get to Maklu. We might actually have to walk.” He glared at the road like this was personally offending him in refusing to give up its secrets. “And hope like hell we’re on the _right_ road, because they’re all like this.”

Walking. How many months would _that_ take?

Steve's rescuee was staring at Tony like he was a promise from heaven, and his eyes flicked over to the covered shield like it, too, held the secret of happiness... Steve frowned, shifting uncomfortably. From Earth to Mars – but if Asgardians could hear across worlds, maybe this place had communications that spanned that far, too. “Son?”

“You are going to Maklu,” the young man said. “And you do not know the way. In the worldly tongue I am known as Tripitaka, after that buddha who brought back the scrolls of Heaven to the poor east. If you will shave your heads and take vows, then I will accept you as my disciples and guide you upon the path to the Heavenly Mountain.”

“Yeah, we’re not doing the vows part,” Tony said flatly.

Tripitaka looked so crestfallen that Steve added, “Sorry,” reflexively.

“But you are to be my disciples,” he insisted. “I know you are. The Bodhisattva Kuan-Yin visited me in a dream and told me so – and look,” he dug into the worn cloth bag that he carried, and pulled out golden bowl, much dented on one end; a plain but obviously well-cared-for metal circlet, like someone might wear to keep a cloth head-covering in place; and an obviously very sharp razor-blade that looked a lot like the one Steve usually used for shaving, except even more old-fashioned. Tripitaka held out these items with the expression of a man offering incontestable proof. “And she guided me to the rock these were buried beneath and I dug them up the next day, so you cannot claim that it was merely a dream of no substance at all.”

Steve held up a hand. “Hang on. Who’s this... Bodhisattva?” He was pretty sure he wasn’t pronouncing that right at all, enhanced memory or not.

“The holy Kuan-Yin, Who Observes the Sounds of the World, the Mercy Goddess.”

“But why would she... huh,” Tony said, and reached out to take the circlet from Tripitaka; the monk happily let him have it. “Okay, I can believe she’s from Maklu.”

“Extremis?” Steve asked warily.

“The properly working kind – maybe.” Tony frowned at it, flipping it over and over between his hands, staring at it. He broke the look long enough to give Tripitaka an irritated glance, and then, gingerly, set it on his head. His gaze went very far away. “Huh.”

“Well?” asked Steve.

“Not sure,” said Tony vaguely. “It’s got some kind of built-in interface popping up, but it’s not letting me – ”

Tripitaka mumbled something under his breath, nonsense words; Steve shot a glance at him, but his lips were barely moving. He looked nervous. “Tony, maybe you shouldn’t – ”

Tony’s face twisted in agony; he dropped to his knees, clutching at his head with a half-strangled scream. Steve lunged forward to pull the damn circlet off and had to pry Tony’s gauntleted hands away first, but even then the metal wouldn’t budge beneath his fingers. It was like it was welded to Tony’s skull, except that Steve could _break_ welds – he couldn’t use more force than he already was; he might break _Tony’s_ skull instead. Or worse: the edges were vanishing beneath his fingertips, like the more he tried to pull it away, the more it tried to burrow beneath Tony’s skin. _Shit._ It had to be something like the maglock – something internally activated. “Tony! Stop accessing it, turn it _off_ – ”

Tony sagged in his grip, seized-up muscles going limp, but when Steve tried to pull the circlet away it still stayed locked fast. At least Tony was no longer _screaming_ – he didn’t sound entirely with it, though, as he breathed, “ _What_ the hell...?”

Steve straightened, keeping one hand on Tony to keep him from toppling over, and rounded on Tripitaka. It was all he could do to keep from barking at the man like a drill sergeant – “What is that thing?”

“It – it is one of the treasures of my namesake,” babbled Tripitaka. “The headband worn by the Great Monkey Sage during his journey to the west as Tripitaka’s disciple. See, I knew Kuan-Yin was right! It would not have worked if you were not the ones meant to come with me.”

Tony was climbing to his feet, no lingering traces of pain present in his demeanour other than considerable wariness – so Steve left him to stand on his own, strode over to the monk, and pulled Tripitaka toward him with a hand fisted in the front of his robe. He glared down – a _long_ way down; Tripitaka was probably even shorter than Steve himself had been before the serum. “You mean it was _supposed_ to do that?”

“I – ” Tripitaka’s eyes were round as saucers, and Steve realized what he was going to just a moment too late. He still mumbled – nobody without enhanced hearing would have picked up the syllables – but the moment the first sound dropped from his lips Tony was screaming again, and Steve lifted Tripitaka into and shook him _hard_ , breaking the awful mumbling chant –

“Do that again and I will kill you,” Steve promised him, feeling the sick resolve of necessity settle in his gut. Oh, he might be able to knock the guy out – but they didn’t have any way to bring him to justice, and he had the bad feeling they’d been conned.

“No, no!” protested Tripitaka, flailing his feet. “You can’t – you’re supposed to come with me as my disciples!”

“We are _not coming with you_ ,” Steve said, barely keeping it from being a snarl. “Tell us how to get it off him!”

“Jesus Christ, my empire for an Advil,” Tony said from behind him, sounding muffled, like he was speaking into his hands. Steve turned so he could keep an eye on him – he was, in fact, speaking into his hands, having retracted the armour’s gloves to pry at the metal band with his bare fingertips. That... wasn’t a good sign.

“I don’t _know_ ,” protested Tripitaka. “The Bodhisattva only taught me the mantra of constriction!”

“Then how did this – monkey sage get rid of it?” Steve demanded. Oh, Lord, if the answer was _death_ –

“When he ascended the mountain of Heaven and reached true enlightenment it vanished,” squealed Tripitaka, and Steve forced himself to relax his grip before he accidentally strangled the lying little monk. There had to be a special place in hell for men who abused their religious authority with such goddamned temerity. “You _have_ to come with me – ”

“We’re _not_ ,” Steve said, dropping him to the ground with disgust. Tripitaka didn’t manage to keep his feet, even though it was only about a foot of a drop, and landed in a heap on the road. Steve leaned down, picked up his sack, and emptied it out beside him – but there wasn’t anything else that looked like the circlet. Still, the first jewellery... “Tony, anything weird about the rest of this stuff?”

“No,” said Tony after a second. “I think. Shit, maybe it’s just turned off.” His voice was almost normal – _almost_. There was a thin, shaking undercurrent that he wasn’t quite managing to hide.

Steve nodded, and began picking up the rest of it to stuff it back into the sack – they could drop it into the river; hopefully that would be enough to keep Tripitaka from using it on somebody else. “We’re leaving, and we’re taking this with us,” he informed Tripitaka. “If you try using that phrase again, we’ll come back, and I _will_ kill you.”

It was almost like the War, being in occupied territory, dealing with members of the Resistance who went too far over the line – but there was no authority to turn to here, no friends, no family, no fellow members of the Resistance who could see past their terribly justified pain. _Here_ these people killed people because apparently it didn’t mean anything – what if they thought of torture the same way?

“If you kill me, I’ll just say it from the underworld,” Tripitaka said, his voice trembling but not backing down despite the fresh tears on his face. “Monkey wouldn’t obey Tripitaka, and he wouldn’t have reached Heaven if Tripitaka hadn’t forced him to keep to the paths of holiness; and you won’t either, if you don’t have a priest to guide you. This is my _duty_ – ”

Steve turned his back on him; the rest of the words filtered into his brain and were catalogued, but he needed to know – “Is he right _?”_ he asked Tony in a low voice, kneeling down and putting an arm on Tony’s shoulder. “Could he – ”

That somebody could curse you all the way from Hell – well, it wasn’t like it was unheard of in religion. It just wasn’t the sort of thing that Steve had expected to see working through an alien device. It would be from another _world_ – and in this world, without satellites, the radio had cut out when Tony had gotten too far away. But radios worked – well, Steve wasn’t entirely sure how they worked, but he knew it wasn’t by sending the sound itself across all that distance; there was some sort of intermediate signal. On the other hand, Tony had said that Asgardians, and other small-g gods, could _hear_ their names spoken across such distances. If they could do _that,_ then they could probably make devices that triggered on it, too...

They had been so damn lucky that Loki had no head for strategy _or_ tactics _or_ logistics. Fury hadn’t been wrong when he’d said Earth was hopelessly outgunned.

Which didn’t help their current situation any, Steve thought, as Tony gave a small nod. Steve gripped his shoulder tighter – Tony’s face was far too pale, and though he was doing an admirable job of keeping any sign of tension from his expression, his eyes wouldn’t settle – he kept flicking his gaze about, rapid-fire fast, scanning for _threats_ –

Steve found himself reconsidering letting Tripitaka live, with a sort of brutal resolve he hadn’t felt since the War. But killing him wasn’t an option.

Time to review what options he did have, then. He could knock him out, or do worse – enough brain-damage and he wouldn’t be speaking anything. A broken jaw would accomplish the same thing – probably; he wasn’t so sure he could knock out Tripitaka permanently without just outright killing him. Humans were damn fragile, and this particular type of alien didn’t seem much tougher. The people in this village probably weren’t inclined to give him medical care – which gave poor odds for Tripitaka surviving. But if he left him incapacitated, then he might heal, or get healing, or – _damn it_ –

“I promise, I _promise_ I won’t use it again except if you leave,” squeaked Tripitaka. “You have to take me with you!”

“I think I’d rather just kill you,” said Tony, too calmly, as he climbed back onto his feet. Steve helped – or tried to; Tony wouldn’t bend, wouldn’t let him take any weight, but Steve was damned if he was just going to let him go, not with that look on his face.

“Well – you can’t!”

Steve swore, mentally, with every curse he’d ever learned from the Army, and a fair number that were particular to Depression-era Brooklyn – because the bastard was right. If they left him, if they cracked his skull open – unless they came across someplace they could stick him in prison without worrying that he’d just get himself executed for being rude in court, or decide that if he couldn’t make it to Heaven, he’d at least be a damn nuisance in Hell –

“Extremis,” said Steve, speaking solely to Tony. “Can you – I don’t know, infect him with some nanobots and use them to prevent him from talking?”

Tony shook his head, face pale. “No. Hard override, no infecting other living people: first thing I put in, back when it was still malleable – even I can’t get back around it now.”

A gag. Restraints. They’d have to feed him – how far would Tripitaka’s dedication go? Humans could be damn creative about suicide, and they didn’t even know how Tripitaka differed from human; the people here – or back in that city, so far back as to be on another planet – they had different vocal chords, so what else was different? They only needed to fail once –

 “ _Fuck,_ ” said Tony, vicious and succinct.

 

 

 

“Your lasers – ”

“Are a no-go. Even thinking about trying to cut it off makes it start burrowing into my head.” Tony’s voice was quiet, flat.

“How sure are you that he’d be able to trigger it from beyond the grave?” Steve kept one eye on Tony, and the other carefully on Tripitaka, who was scrubbing off by the side of the river. He didn’t trust the monk to not fall in and drown – and then take it out on Tony. But the man really did need to clean off, and so here they were, standing near the grassy bank just past where the last farmer’s field ended.

“I appreciate the thought.” Tony smiled tightly. “Very sure.”

Steve glanced sideways at him.

“The dead and the living can cross paths, depending on the afterlife. You should read some of the legends.” He wrinkled his nose. “Who knew, all that mandatory Classics paid off.”

“I’ve read some.” Steve shrugged one shoulder. “Hard to tell what’s real.”

“Well, this part is.” Tony was far too subdued for Steve’s comfort – and he was volunteering information. Cooperating, and meekly. Steve wanted to strangle Tripitaka. “When I – fell, I told you – I ended up in one. An afterlife, I mean. Boring place, the owner was pretty dour – had surprisingly good company, though.” His gaze slid off of Steve toward the ground, like he couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.

Steve blinked in sudden understanding, and had to force himself to breathe in. Out.

This shouldn’t feel like a kick to the gut.

“You weren’t – ” said Tony, right at the time Steve asked, “What did – ”

They stopped, looking at each other – and then away; they needed to keep an eye on Tripitaka... whose arms were pinwheeling; he’d mis-stepped, one foot sliding out from beneath him. Steve started upward in concern, but a moment later the monk fell over backward and managed to land on the flatter part of the embankment behind him.

“You’re not a replacement,” Tony said, and didn’t that feel like just _another_ sock in the gut, because Steve hadn’t even considered –

Had he?

That week when Tony hadn’t known him, after Anthony had wiped his mind – hadn’t he wondered since then if the man he knew was real? Tony had been crazy, then dead, and now he was possibly part zombie – Steve hadn’t known him. Why was it so hard to imagine that the reverse had been true, too? Except that Tony said it wasn’t.

“You sure about that?” Steve asked instead of his original question.

Silence. Steve glanced at him again; Tony’s shoulders were slumped. “No.”

Steve shook his head and laughed softly. “It’s not like I can hold it against you.”

It didn’t matter. They were friends now – right?

“I’m sorry I can’t – ” Tony’s voice caught; he broke off and coughed before he tried again. “Everything died, Steve. It took maybe half an hour. After that there was just the dead – and there you were again.”

“Tony. It wasn’t me.”

“Similar enough, when you weren’t being a dick.” It was a half-hearted insult; pathetic for use against enemies and not funny enough to be an endearment toward a friend – a poor effort all ‘round. “I don’t know how long – I think it was months. Time was strange. It’s strange here, too – time is passing slower for you when we’re split up, I’ve been checking your watch.”

Steve started, his train of thoughts diverting onto another track. “What?” Tony had said – _It’s been thirty seconds for you._ “When you went to go check the...” he waved a hand at the sky to indicate spatial _weirdness_ , “how long was it for you?”

“Couple of hours,” Tony admitted, and, “Don’t look at me like that.”

“I’m not – ”

“I could see there was time dilation after two minutes, I knew you’d be feeling it slower. I needed the additional scans to tell me how _much_ slower, but it wasn’t hard.” He hesitated. “I already apologized for this.”

He sounded apologetic _now_. Was that because he really meant it, or because he was still shaken by the circlet sitting on his head, the one that the fingers on his left hand kept worrying at?

This wasn’t – helping. “How close do we need to stick to the road?” Steve asked instead.

“Close. The field strength damps pretty quick in air – I wish Bruce could see it, the readings are... it’s amazing, really, how it works. The path it takes you on – anybody standing beside the road oughtta be impossible to see, but hey, there they are... until you blink, I guess.” He held his hands about a foot and a half apart and brought them together, then apart again. “The capacitive effect is a lot stronger in the horizontal plane – you keep the field with you when you step off of it, for just a bit, until the charge wears off. Sort of. Well, not really, but it’s a good enough comparison.”

A bit of excitement was starting to come back into his voice, bringing back the memory of grease and metal, murmured explanations over holograms in a darkened room. “You figured out how it works that quick?”

Tony snorted. “Oh, god, no. What it does, yes – sort of. _How_ , no way. It’s even more complicated than the bifrost in one of the gold-marble-worlds. I wish I had more time to play with it.” He sounded wistful. “I could take a bit of it apart, probably. Something that large – it’s got an energy source I could tap into, send you home.”

 _You_. Steve glanced again at Tripitaka, had given up on using his clothes as rags to scrub himself with, and simply climbed in, holding tight to a nearby tree-root. He looked like a drowned rat, but somehow, Steve couldn’t manage to feel much sympathy for his shivers. “I’m staying.”

Tony took a moment to answer; when he did, it was over the comm., and quiet. _“Thanks.”_

Tripitaka must have slipped on the river bottom – or perhaps he was just that naturally clumsy. One moment, he was standing upright in the shallows, the next he was being carried downstream, doing a poor imitation of swimming that barely managed to keep his head above water.

“Damnit,” Steve muttered, lunging for the bank – because he certainly wasn’t going to put Tony in the position of needing to fish the bastard out.

Not that it kept Tony from going after him anyway. _“Steve, your suit’s awesome, but it’s not waterproof,”_ Tony said over the faint clicking noises of the armour solidifying. He stepped past Steve and into flight so smoothly that Steve did a double-take. He’d been _good_ before extremis – but that kind of takeoff was something else.

Tripitaka’s head disappeared beneath water; Tony skimmed close to the surface, one hand out to balance himself in the air, and with the other hand punched down into the river, emerging with an iron grip about Tripitaka’s wrist. He reversed course smoothly, with admiral care for his passenger – Tripitaka’s momentum swung him out, but not far, the forces gentle enough that –

“Look out!” Steve barked, the shield in his hands before he had time to register what he was seeing. He pivoted, arm curling out and extending, the shield singing as it flew through the air. The warning had been unnecessary, shouted without thought: Tony had already been reacting, and his sharp, sudden acceleration whipped Tripitaka around and just over the shield’s arc. It connected solidly with the scales of the monster rising from the river: a sea-serpent – or, well, a river-serpent. It looked an awful lot like the dragons – it had the same type of shimmering, subtly iridescent scales – but its five long fins marked it as different: one starting from the crown of its head and flaring straight up and two more on each side, pointing up and down. From head-on it looked like an x-wing with an antenna stuck on it. Then it twisted to the side as the shield struck it, and Steve got a good look at the lethally sharp blades spiking off of those fins at artistically pleasing intervals.

Damn it. Another dragon attacking them for no reason –

\- _hang on_ –

“Tony, back off,” Steve snapped, and then, projecting his voice like a drill sergeant (or rather, like Annie, who had been the chorus line leader for the USO girls and could have bellowed any drill sergeant into the ground), “We do not intend to trespass! We’re backing off!” _Names – they’d said they had to declare –_ “My name is Steve Rogers, and my companions are Tony Stark and Tripitaka. We’re travelling to Maklu. As pilgrims,” he added, because even if it wasn’t _exactly_ the truth, it was close enough – and he’d take every advantage he could get. His shield arced back toward him and he raised a hand to catch it.

Tony was already back land, of course – even carrying a squishy passenger, he could have flown across Manhattan during that speech. Now he hovered above Steve, having dropped Tripitaka in a groaning heap about a hundred yards back from the bank. But the river-dragon _had_ paused as Steve spoke – listening? He couldn’t tell. How was he supposed to read the expression of something, somebody, who was so completely alien?

The giant head wavered; the fins flared, rippling down its enormous sides to where they vanished beneath the water – rendering it effectively invisible to Steve, at least. Did it have some way of hiding from Tony’s scans, too? Or had it just travelled fast enough that speed allowed it to seem like it was sneaking up on them? The sky-dragons had gotten the drop on Tony back at the city, but that could have been by the same effect. Space itself was weird here (and God knew that something that would make Tony sound so gleefully awed had to be _really weird_ ), and that made it hard to come up with a yardstick against which to measure their abilities. A yard might be a mile – might be a solar system.

The river-dragon dropped entirely beneath the surface. The fast-running river carried the ripples of its presence downstream and, within seconds, dispersed them entirely. A retreat? Or a tactical repositioning so it could ambush them from another angle? The road ran along this river for now; the thing would have plenty more opportunities to ambush them.

 _“It’s gone,”_ said Tony, sounding baffled. _“How the hell_ _did it_ – _I’m impressed._ ”

That answered the question about whether it could beat Tony’s sensors, at least. Did it? “It didn’t just swim really far away really fast?”

_“If it hit a spatio-temporal distortion sharp enough to vanish on my sensors like that, it’s dead. Though I suppose it could help... use the folds while... huh...”_

_That_ tone was familiar. Alright – time to get a move on. They needed to get to a town willing to take pity on pilgrims, and try buying supplies supplies in exchange for a day or two of labour – according to Tripitaka’s complaints on their walk over to the river, the locals were spiritually bereft and would offer no sort of succor at all. If it hadn’t been for the underhanded monk’s trump card, Steve would have tested that assertion – but he didn’t dare set Tripitaka off into the sort of hysterics that he’d been in before. On the other hand, Steve didn’t want to give him too much free reign – if he stopped being such a snivelling coward, then he could turn the current situation completely FUBAR.

And Tony... hadn’t said anything one way or the other.

“Alright,” Steve said, striving for a normal tone. “You can think about it on the road – it’s time we were moving anyway, and I don’t wanna be hanging around here if that thing decides to come back.”

Tony landed, his jet boots squishing softly in the ground of the bank – with the armour, he had a heavier footprint than Steve, although not as heavy as the Mark VIII would have made. “I hate running in this thing, it’s such a waste of time,” Tony sighed, retracting the faceplate, and then perking up as a thought occurred to him. “Hey, I could reconfigure the armour for roller-skates – the road’s smooth enough. Repulsor propulsion – ”

“Run the numbers a few more times first,” Steve said, because even if that sounded like the stupidest idea in the world, it might work. But it probably wouldn’t be very comfortable. “Until then, I’ll carry him.” He certainly wasn’t going to ask Tony to do it – aside from any personal concerns, if Tripitaka needed to be choked out in a hurry, Tony likely wasn’t going to be able to do it. Letting the guy walk was out of the question - just the short trip over to the river, away from the road, had been painful. Steve could have outrun him at age six, asthmatic and all.  

“Sure. I need to figure out where to pull the mass from.” He sighed. “Extremis lets me self-repair the armour, but the damn dragon charred off a half-kilo of it.”

And then he’d wasted some of it on the fake passports, too. Did this mean that they needed more supplies than just food? “Can you make more?”

“It’s all nanobots, Steve – yes, I can make more, but since I’m not exactly a fusion reactor I need base elements.” He brooded. “Well, part of me’s a fusion reactor, but not one that works like that. I have some supplies... eh, but a half-kilo’s not worth the effort of digging into those reserves. I wish I knew how Bruce does it.”

Base elements. Well, everything was base elements, right? So he needed... iron? “They had metal tools back in that town.”

“Awesome nicknames aside, not _actually_ made of iron, here.”

“Gold-titanium alloy, I know.”

Tony snorted. “So you were listening.”

“Always was.”

“Right.” Tony looked away, shifting uncomfortably. “Add in a bunch more carbon, these days, but that’s not a problem. I’ve got spare titanium and gold to spare, though picking up more wouldn’t hurt. The main problem is that building more isn’t instantaneous.”

And until then, Tony would be functioning with under-strength armour. Great. Steve clapped him on the shoulder again, acutely aware of how much he was checking his strength. Maybe he didn’t need to, against Tony, who rebuilt himself with extremis. Maybe he did, more than ever. “Next town, people’ll be friendlier.”

“Sure, if we can get there without being eaten by a dragon,” Tony said dryly. He shifted again, and grimaced as the mud squelched around his boots.

“Time to go,” Steve said softly, and he dropped his hand, took a breath, and squared his shoulders. _You can do this._ Without _killing the bastard._

“You saved my life!” Tripitaka exclaimed at them both as they neared. “See, I told you, you’re meant to be my disciples.”

 _“You need to stop talking, except to answer questions,”_ Tony said, his voice flat and metallic through the helmet.

“But I’m meant to impart holy wisdom to you.”

“There is nothing holy about what you’re doing.” Steve loomed over him. He seemed to have bounced back awfully fast from being robbed, destitute, and then attacked by a river dragon – even though his clothes were all still soaked through, and despite the sun shining down, it wasn’t all that warm. Probably it was from having power over somebody else – Tripitaka struck him as _that_ type of bully. “Because we have to, we’re taking you with us to Maklu. Since we gotta stay on the roads, I’m going to carry you.”

“Oh, that will be much faster,” said Tripitaka, looking nervous but pleased, which was somehow more annoying than if he’d kicked up a fuss.

Tripitaka’s clothes were damp and disgusting – the monk himself was damp and disgusting – but since the river apparently wasn’t safe, Steve would just have to put up with it until they found a friendlier village. He knew from hard experience long before the War that the smells would fade to unimportance in a few minutes. Having the foul smell soaking through his uniform was less unpleasant than the mental weight of carrying around the odious little man, piggy-pack style. Tripitaka barely weighed anything.

 _“Roller-skates,”_ Tony said firmly in his ear, jogging along beside him. They were sprinting, by any normal human standard, but Steve could keep this pace up all day.

The movements of the armour were too precise – no, that was the wrong word. Too repetitious. Each step was exactly the same as the last one. Before they’d been running a minute, even if Tony hadn’t previously mentioned that he was using the armour to run, it would have been obvious.

“You are very fast,” said Tripitaka, clutching at Steve’s shoulders more strongly.

“Shut up and meditate,” Steve told him, and to Tony, “Using wheels to travel over a flat road? That might just work.” Except – roller-skates, _really?_

 _“Ha! No, you’re right, the point is to maintain a minimum amount of_ contact _with the road... if I put the wheels on my hands and fly horizontal, that’ll be much more efficient.”_

There was a Stark Industries inside joke that Pepper had once told him, about the various ways Tony Stark had made his engineers cry over the years in his pursuit of efficiency. It would have been crass to say it, though, so instead Steve just said, “Sounds like a good way to give your passengers a deadly case of road rash.”

_“I never said the calculations wouldn’t be complex. Good thing my brain’s a supercomputer now, isn’t it?”_

Right, because Tony being infected with extremis was such a good thing.

_“And – hang on. There’s a bridge up ahead – and something on it.”_

Steve squinted. Was it just his imagination, or did the road blur? It could have been heat radiating off of the stone. They drew nearer, and it resolved steadily: the road sweeping into a gentle arc, stone supports falling away beneath, the gentle rush of water – a _lot_ of water, but without much in the way of rapids.

On top of the bridge, near the rails, was one of those uncomfortably six-legged horse-like creatures. It had on a tall saddle – which tapered a bit, until Steve could see how it might be possible for someone human-sized to sit on the thing and still be able to walk afterward – and a great many saddlebags, more than Steve thought an ordinary four-legged horse would have been able to happily carry, especially packed as full as they looked. There were bright green ribbons braided into its mane and tail, and an intricately wrought bit in its mouth; the reins had been wrapped around the saddle pommel, though, rather than about the stone rails. Its owner was nowhere to be seen.

If there was an owner. The horse eyed them curiously as they made their way up to the bridge – at a walk, now, more cautiously than before – but as soon as they’d stepped foot upon the span, it tossed its head, whinnied with something that sounded like joy, and headed straight for them at a fast trot.

 _“Alien horse, huh,”_ said Tony, raising his hands, palms up and repulsors glowing, ready to fire.

“It might be friendly,” said Steve. It could be. He slipped his shield so that it was ready to throw anyway.

“Oh, yes!” said Tripitaka. “The Bodhisattva said that the river dragon would be my mount. This must be him, come to make amends!”

What?

The horse trotted up in a friendly fashion, slowing to a halt several feet away, at which point it neighed happily and stuck its head out – for a carrot? Or was it looking for an opportunity to bite him? Steve’s real-life experience with horses was limited to catching glimpses of them through train-windows, when the USO tour had passed near the occasional field with them – he’d never been this close to one before. Of course, he still wasn’t anywhere near an _actual_ horse – and it was probably pretty stupid of him to think of it like a horse. The dragons had all been able to talk; the horse didn’t _look_ like a dragon, Tripitaka’s bizarre comment aside, but there was a good chance it was just as smart as any of them.

“Uh, I’m Steve Rogers, this is Tony Stark, and we’re going to Maklu,” said Steve. If it was anything like a dragon, it was probably best to get the necessities of polite – or at least non-homicidal – society out of the way first. “And this is Tripitaka, who is... coming with us.”

The horse nickered softly, and butted its head forward – Steve tensed, and almost brained it with his shield, but it just seemed to want to nuzzle at his hand. Well, that was... promising?

“You are the river dragon who is to carry me to Maklu,” said Tripitaka happily, hopping down from Steve’s back and stepping forward to reach up for the reins. It was a long way up, Tripitaka being as short as he was, and as damp and still dirty as he was, he made a poor contrast to the fine quality of the horse’s mane and its gear.

But the horse didn’t seem to mind – or at least, it was too polite to show anything if it did mind. Though it did stop nickering so happily. Instead, it solemnly dropped down, into an awkward half-bow, before settling enough that Tripitaka would be able to easily reach its back – or _should_ have been able to easily reach its back. Tripitaka immediately tried scrambling up and nearly fell over the other side before Steve caught the back of his robe and hauled him into a balanced spot.

The horse rose gracefully up to standing again and plodded off the road some distance, Tripitaka hanging onto the pommel for dear life despite the sedate, practically snail-like pace. Steve watched apprehensively for a minute before going after it: it was heading for the river-bank. But the horse stopped before the actual water, at a spot where the drop-off turned into a small pebbled beach, shallow water not nearly deep enough for a river-serpent to swim or hide in. Then it dropped to its haunches again and whinnied. Pointedly. Tripitaka, perhaps shoved by a rocking motion on the part of the horse, tumbled to the ground.

 _“I think I like him,”_ remarked Tony. _“Let’s call him George.”_

“If it’s a him,” said Steve, and shrugged. “Maybe he has soap?”

 _“Hey, George, do you have soap in those saddlebags?”_ Tony asked aloud.

George whinnied again, dipped his head around to one of the saddlebags, and began tugging at the fastening with his teeth. He worried at them for a few seconds before giving a gesture that looked like a shrug – evidently easier for a horse that had three front legs instead of one with merely two – and looking pointedly at Tripitaka. Apparently not completely blind – maybe self-interest made him smarter? – Tripitaka unfastened it and began digging through it, coming up with a cloth bag holding something shaped like a brick.

 _“Okay,”_ said Tony thoughtfully. _“Operation: Rollerskates has gotten upgraded to Operation: Jet-car. Shit. I don’t have enough raw materials on hand for that. We’re gonna need to go shopping.”_

 

 

 

“What should – we call you?” Steve huffed out sometime later. The river was far behind them; they were travelling at a pretty good clip now, enough to wind even him. The horse was breathing harder, too. Tony didn’t sound like he was putting out any effort at all, but then, the armour was doing the running for him – and anyway, he was communicating over the radio with his mind. Lungs didn’t enter into it.

The horse whinnied, then made a noise that sounded much closer to a growl than anything Steve had ever expected to hear from a horse. It was a surprise to the horse, too – its eyes rolled back, ears flicking back to lie as flat against its skull as they could go, and it briefly kicked up its pace to outstrip both Steve and Tony.

 _“Woah!”_ exclaimed Tony, taking off from the road and jetting along to keep up, but the horse slowed after only a few seconds anyway – which was a good thing, because Steve wouldn’t have been able to catch it even while sprinting.

“That is not becoming behaviour!” squeaked Tripitaka, who was holding to the saddle pommel with a death-grip. “Shame!”

The horse, for its part, did actually look embarrassed, head drooping and its stride turning into something that somehow resembled a shuffle without actually slowing it down any further.

“I guess we can’t – pronounce your real name?” Steve asked, after he’d put on enough speed to catch up. Looked like, for all the doubts he’d had about the horse, _he_ was the one who was limiting their speed now.  

Damnit. He thought he’d left that behind in Brooklyn.

The horse bobbed its head in a nod, then shook its head from side to side, and Steve hazarded another guess. “Or – you can’t?” Maybe it really was a river dragon. Though if it was, then why was it now a horse? Surely a dragon could carry them just as well.

 _“Secretariat, then, in honour of the most kick-ass horse to ever horse,”_ said Tony - only the first word aloud; for the rest, he continued on the comm.

“I didn’t realize – you knew anything – about horses. Bit old-fashioned - for you,” Steve said in an undertone, and louder, to the horse, “It’s up to you.”

The horse did that very strange weight-on-centre-leg shrug again, giving the impression of droopy resignation. Steve studied its long face and decided that it wasn’t resignation at the name – it didn’t look directed at him, but inward. Unhappy that it couldn’t pronounce its own name?  That might be evidence in favour of it actually being a dragon...

 _“Money, dear boy,”_ said Tony, with a mocking – and terrible – English accent. _“I’m pretty sure I have a stable of derby winners somewhere – not sure, I might have donated them to the Boyscouts.”_

The hesitation was minute, so much that it almost wasn’t there. Have? _Had_. And if he hadn’t donated them to the Boyscouts, then he certainly didn’t have them anymore. That came with being declared dead. But with so much of the estate frozen or seized, Pepper didn’t _have_ any anymore, either.

“That is a strange name,” said Tripitaka doubtfully. “You should be called after your predecessor. I give you the name of Yulong.” At this, the horse looked more cheerful.

Steve tamped down a feeling of instant dislike. The horse wanted to be called that? Fine.

 _“Fuck it,”_ muttered Tony over the comm., so quietly that Steve wasn’t sure he’d meant to send that.

“What is it?” Steve whispered, turning his face away so that his lips couldn’t be read by either Tripitaka or Yulong.

“ _Sorry,_ ” Tony said, contrite and recriminating – self-recriminating. _“I should have noticed before – idiot. It’s not just the Norse. Myths and legends aren’t so made up out here. I think we’ve fallen into one – or a re-enactment of one... if time is going strange, that might be the same as the real thing. I should have read up on Chinese legends before I left, clearly. Why the hell did I ever think this would be straight-forward?”_

“Optimist,” Steve said, a little bit smugly. Tony could pretend to be a world-weary cynic until hell froze over; it hadn’t taken more than a month of his company for Steve to realize that, hidden behind that facade, Tony’s inner core of optimism shone brighter than the arc reactor. Tony believed that the world could _and would_ be better than it was.

Despite everything, the fact that he still _did_ made Steve’s heart lighter.

 _“Oh, shut up,”_ Tony said, but at least if he sounded annoyed at Steve he didn’t sound so angry at himself.

He wasn’t asking the obvious question, though. Steve grimaced. “Alright,” he said, the sternness he’d been aiming for not quite making it through – the huffing and puffing sort of hindered it. “Tripitaka. Who was – your predecessor?”

Tripitaka’s face wrinkled into a look of utter reverence, so deeply that for a moment he even loosened his grip from the saddle’s pommel – although he immediately clung on again as soon as Yulong’s rhythmic gait had him sway in the slightest. “I should not be surprised you do not know,” he sighed pathetically. “Holy Hsüan Tsang, called Tripitaka when he ventured out into the world, was a priest of great holy power. Some thousand years ago or more he was charged by the Bodhisattva Kuan-Yin to venture forth to Heaven and there receive the scrolls of Transcendence and Persuasion for Good Will, to be brought back to the east and enlighten the souls of the ignorant folk who dwell here.”

“He went to Maklu,” said Steve.

“Yes, they are now known as one and the same,” agreed Tripitaka, looking put out at being interrupted. “This was not the case in ancient times, as every child ought learn at school. You are very untutored.” Steve focused hard on running, the placement of one foot in front of the other, the exact angle of his arms and depth of his breath; and it was not a long pause before Tripitaka continued, “To him he gathered four disciples. The first was the Great Sage Who Is Equal To Heaven, the Monkey-King, whose impatience and arrogance would have driven him from the path to enlightenment save the presence of the ring which I have placed upon you.” Here he glanced at Tony.

The road wasn’t interesting enough anymore. “Move on,” Steve said harshly.

Tripitaka peered down at him from his perch atop Yulong, but continued. “The second was a gluttonous pig-spirit, whose name the Great Temples now cannot agree upon; and there are some who contend that the true name has been lost to time. The third was the river ogre Sandy, who was quiet and steadfast but had sinned greatly by slaying and eating travellers; and the fourth was Yulong, one of the sons of the Dragon King of the West Sea.” Here he paused again. “Each of the Great Temples has an extensive version of the myth, but apart from these details, there is no unanimous agreement. All but the Temple of Great and Eternal Sorrow hold that Tripitaka was successful in his quest, bringing back the entirety of the knowledge that the Great Buddha had intended for him to spread, and that soon-after – a day, a year, or a decade – he vanished along with his disciples, to return to the west and become a Buddha himself.” He shook his head sadly. “The lack of agreement among the Great Temples has been the cause of much disharmony throughout the centuries. But,” and he brightened, “I shall learn the true story when we reach Maklu itself, and then it may be brought back to the east, and all shall be at peace again.”

“That’s why you’re – doing this?”

Tripitaka nodded solemnly. “I am not very suited to the life of a warrior monk,” he confessed. “I am no good at healing the physical body, although I have a very great knowledge of scripture and am an excellent guide.”

 _Like hell you are,_ Steve thought. And, hell – Loki had been claiming he’d come to ‘free’ them. God save humanity from nutso aliens like him and Tripitaka.

“But without physical might to force wisdom upon them, no ruler is willing to heed mere _words_ from a lowly monk; the greatest sages of the Great Temples have forgotten their mandate and now maintain their power through the cruel use of force. I was near to despair when Holy Kuan-Yin appeared to me in a dream, and commanded me to journey west! And at my lowest point, she led you to me – and then this fine horse. So I shall keep faith and not despair. Surely the mandate of Heaven is upon us!”

Right – Steve never heard _that_ one before. A champion of peace and diplomacy – except when it came to Tripitaka’s own goals. A ‘small’ injustice could be excused in the name of a higher righteousness. No one would listen to him? Better _make_ them, then – by pain or by fear, it all worked out the same.

They ran on in silence for a while after, until Tripitaka, apparently feeling that he needed to ‘educate’ his disciples, began to lecture on the basic tenets of Buddhism – the version practiced in this world, at least. It was too much of an effort to try to listen to him without snapping at him to shut up, shut _up_ , so despite knowing that he ought to be looking for insight into Tripitaka’s mind, Steve ended up tuning him out, turning his thoughts inward.

Gentle strains of jazz music began echoing from his comm., and Steve glanced over at Tony, lips twitching. The facemask showed no signs of amusement, of course, but the volume increased slightly.


	4. The Demon Mountains

“...to stop...”

“... _Steve...”_

_“...Steve... listening?...”_

“Steve, hey, time to stop,” said Tony, faceplate retracted for the first time in –

Steve blinked.

He didn’t know how long it had been.

The lack of forward motion staggered him and he nearly fell. No, that was the exhaustion. How long - ? He couldn’t think. Adrenaline made a weak attempt at waking him and was turned back. But they weren’t in friendly territory – he couldn’t just drop off –

“It’s safe now,” said Tony, and Steve felt all his muscles turning to water. In some dim recess of his mind, a protest was shouted – _Tony didn’t have the best judgement_ – but it was too small to fight the fatigue crawling over him, dragging him down. “Come on, Shadowfax, you too – time to get off the damn road – ”

An armoured gauntlet pulled Steve along by the arm – half propping him up. Smooth stone changed to uneven dirt, and Steve stumbled. Then the world tilted, the dirt growing too close, too fast, as Tony exclaimed, “Ack!” and –

Steve slept.

 

 

He woke up ravenously hungry.

“ _Jesus-fucking-finally,”_ said Tony – voiced filtered and metallic though the suit – he was sitting propped up against a rock.

Steve sat up shoving aside the blanket that somebody – probably Tony – had laid out over him. There was another blanket laid out under him, too. Wherever they were, they were not on the road anymore. Squat trees extended their branches out partway over the small clearing, which didn’t manage to be so much ‘flat’ as ‘level in places’. Around them, hills rose up, and some ways in the distance, mountains towered over them balefully. A lump of blankets near the bottom of the clearing was probably Tripitaka; and Yulong was laying down next to him, six legs all akimbo, apparently asleep as well.

Trying to remember what had happened was like snatching at a fading dream. They’d been on a path toward the mountains – Tripitaka had been growing increasingly nervous and fretful, as it was in mountains like these where he’d been attacked previously, and he claimed to have an ‘even worse’ feeling about these ones. It hadn’t helped that Tripitaka had obviously been in need of sleep by then, yet had refused to try sleeping in the saddle, despite Yulong’s vigorous nod to the question of whether or not he could keep a rider in the saddle all on his own.

They had reached the base of the mountains and the road had begun to incline steeper and steeper, and then...?

Steve shook his head, and the emptiness in his stomach made everything else spin. “Food?” he managed hopefully.

 _“Here,”_ said Tony, tossing over a bag of something that proved to be dry fruit. Apples, maybe – Steve barely tasted it as he wolfed it down. A package of thick travel-bread landed in his lap next – Yulong’s saddlebags had been full of the stuff when Steve had checked them. That had been... less than twelve hours ago, as far as he could remember: but from the way his stomach was growling, probably a lot longer than that.

Steve nearly gave himself a case of the hiccups polishing it off, and managed to force himself to slow long enough to properly chew the dried meat that Tony tossed him next. Then he levered himself to his feet, and by the time he’d made it over to the edge of clearing so that he could take care of business, he was no longer staggering. Sleep-muddle cleared from his mind, allowing him to remember the events of the day before in piercing clarity: but still nothing after they’d entered those mountains.

He zipped up and turned back. “What happened?”

 _“Can it wait?”_ Tony sounded grumpy.

No, not grumpy. Exhausted.

Tony didn’t need sleep. Steve was over at his side in an instant. “Are you okay?” Wrong question to ask, he realized immediately –

 _“I’m fine, just could use some shut-eye,”_ said Tony, and flipped up the faceplate. Beneath it, he looked horrible – eyes bruised and bloodshot from lack of sleep, skin sallow, hair greasy – not that Steve was feeling like a paragon of freshness, either – but Tony looked completely run-down. What had _happened_ in those mountains? “Swear, Steve, I’m not – ” he sentence was cut off as he yawned enormously, “ – injured. You can keep watch now?”

The last words were almost a mumble – and these symptoms Steve recognized anywhere, even if he’d never specifically seen them in Tony before: he was crashing, and hard.

“I can. Get some rest,” Steve assured him, patting one armoured knee.

Tony’s eyes were almost closed by the end of Steve’s sentence, but then faceplate closed off without hesitation, cutting Steve off from any visible way of monitoring him. Whether or not Steve was keeping the watch, apparently Tony didn’t feel comfortable enough to sleep with the faceplate off – but the armour didn’t even let Steve see if Tony was still breathing. He looked like a discarded, inanimate toy, a tin soldier made for some giant child.

Heck, somewhere out in the multiverse there probably was a race of giants who gave human-sized dolls to their kids.

What if he –

_For God’s sake, Steve Rogers, he is not going to choke and die in his sleep._

Steve made himself do a thorough check of the perimeter instead. The mountains didn’t loom quite so alarmingly at second glance; they just looked like mountains. The road, he discovered, ran past on the other side of a small rise some fifty feet away, but looking up and down it he couldn’t see any other travellers from the offered vantage point. Nor did it seem like their chosen clearing was a usual traveller’s stop; there was no discarded litter, or signs of other human use, such as old fire pits. It was possible that travellers in this world were just much more environmentally conscious, though – or much more stealthy.

Yulong stirred briefly as Steve went over to check the packs – Tony must have taken them off of him, but apparently he hadn’t known what to do with them after that other than stack them in a haphazard pile. Steve confirmed that the huddled pile of blankets really _did_ contain Tripitaka – part of his bald head was visible at one end, a sandaled foot sticking out of the other – and told the dragon horse, “I got watch. Go back to sleep.” Then he carried the saddlebags closer to Tony’s rock and set himself to going through them seriously.

Yesterday – if it had been yesterday – they’d only paused long enough to get a rough idea of whether they had enough food to last a few days. Steve had planned to do a more thorough check when they stopped, because he at least would need rest at some point, and probably Yulong would as well – a suspicion now borne out by fact. But why did Tony? Under the curse, Tony had gone without sleep for six months without ever getting tired –

Oh, God. How long had they been in those mountains?

_Oh, God._

No. _No._ He needed to not think about that. If he wanted an answer, he’d need to wake Tony – he could – but there was no point in getting the answer right now. There was nothing he could do about it.

How much time had passed?

_Don’t think._

Steve forced himself to focus on inventorying, unpacking and repacking to fit it all back in – whoever had packed the original bags was a master at fitting things into as small a space as possible, and it was a mercy to need to put attention into repacking if he did want to make it all fit again. He did find a pouch of something that could probably be considered ‘slates’, or some other currency, which was good. There wasn’t much food left – it looked like they’d spent at least two or three days in the mountains. But there was _some_. Did that mean they hadn’t –

 _No. Stop thinking of the worst case scenario, damnit._ Leo had taught him breathing exercises – he made use of them, and shoved everything but the immediate present away.

When he finished with the packing he checked the perimeter again, setting it wider, this time. He dug a latrine, patrolled again, gathered firewood and started a small, smokeless fire, patrolled again, and then found himself forced to interrupt a very confused Tripitaka, who had woken up about one terrified second away from mumbling that damned mantra of his.

“Hey – HEY!” said Steve, keeping his hand firmly over Tripitaka’s mouth, pressing him into the ground – or rather, the blankets, because despite what Tripitaka had done to him Tony had apparently still been kind enough to move him onto a blanket. “We’re safe here. I’m going to let you go, and you are _not_ going to say one damn word that would hurt Tony. You understand?”

Tripitaka nodded as best he could – Steve knew he had a grip like iron when he wanted – and Steve released him, slowly, ready to grab him again if need be. But Tripitaka instead sat up and curled against Yulong’s side, pulling one of the blankets tightly around him. The dragon horse wuffled softly at him, and then went back to sleep.

“There were terrible things,” stammered Tripitaka, tears filling his eyes. “Terrible. But I don’t know what they were!”

A memory of shadow stirred at his words; Steve shuddered. “Me neither,” he admitted. “But they’re gone now. We’re out.”

“Oh... I need to meditate... I have lost my inner calm,” Tripitaka mumbled. Steve restrained a snort. From all he’d seen of Tripitaka so far, the man hadn’t had much inner calm to lose – but if he thought meditation could calm him down, Steve was all for it. At least it would keep him quiet.

Tripitaka being awake confined him to the clearing for the next few hours until Tony woke, though – there was no way he was going to leave Tripitaka alone for a moment with Tony, even if Tripitaka hadn’t been so twitchy. He tried meditation himself – Leo had taught him how – but it was far more difficult than usual. When the armour suddenly moved, forward and then to standing – and _silently_ – Steve nearly jumped out of his skin.

He’d gotten used to the sounds of the armour, and it had seemed like this version wasn’t much different in that respect – had Tony just been tossing in those sounds for Steve’s own ease of mind?

“Tripitaka, stay here,” Steve ordered, getting up as well.

“But – what if a monster attacks me?”

“Yulong’ll keep an eye on you,” Steve said, exchanging a glance with the dragon horse, who bobbed his head in acknowledgement before climbing to all six of his feet and trotting over to chew on some of the bushes at the edge of the clearing. “Tony, c’mon.”

 _“Ohgod, I need coffee,”_ Tony muttered over the comm., but he followed.

When they were out of immediate earshot, Steve asked, more plaintively than he would have liked, “What happened?”

 _“Honest to god, not entirely sure,”_ Tony said, crossing his arms over his chest. Defensive. This conversation was off to a great start.

“Take a stab at it anyway. How long were we in those mountains?”

 _“Five days, total_. _Four-point-eight-two_ , if you want to be really precise.” The faceplate melted away as Tony spoke, giving Steve a look at him – Tony’s eyes were still somewhat bruised, but they were no longer bloodshot and half-dizzy with exhaustion. And he was giving Steve a concerned look in return. “Not that long, Steve.”

Steve found himself crossing his own arms – a defensive tic. Damnit, now they were both doing it. He made himself drop his arms back to his sides. “Thanks.”

“Right. Well.” Tony paused uncomfortably. “We got into the mountains. They looked completely normal to me – just like the ones we first landed in. But you and Tripitaka, you kept seeing shadows or something, and then you stopped paying attention... at all. I don’t know what you saw. You weren’t... there. Catatonic – I could sort of force you to eat, but it was a chore. At least you kept running. After a couple hours, it was pretty obvious we were being watched, and it wasn’t friendly. Shadows. Big shapes.” He grimaced. “They closed off behind us, so going back wasn’t the best of ideas.”

“Dragons are big and have lots of teeth to boot, but they can be helpful,” Steve pointed out, feeling strange at having to say it. Tony had been the first guy to take to the Hulk.

“Something was mind-whammying you, I made a judgement call.”

“Fair enough.” Steve sighed. “At least it’s behind us. We’re going to need more supplies, though.”

“I figured after you woke up I could scout for a village up ahead,” Tony shrugged.

“Will that work? I thought things outside the road didn’t line up with what’s on it.” Although he’d found the city earlier... but they’d been flying, then. If they’d stayed on the road, would they have come across it eventually? Or missed it altogether?

“Ehh... yes and no,” Tony hedged. His eyes grew darker and he looked down, shamefaced. “I fucked up back there.”

That was unfair. “You got us all out safe,” Steve pointed out in surprise.

“I should’ve gotten you out earlier.” Tony blew out an explosive sigh. “I tried using the roller-skates without proper testing.”

“Um.” The image of Yulong on roller-skates was... something, alright.

“It didn’t work. Actually it made it take longer, and I’m lucky we didn’t wind up off the road entirely. I fucking hate sentient – ” Tony visibly flailed for a word, and settled on, “world-builders. There’s no reason that _walking_ should be any different than driving a damn car down the thing, but somebody must have wanted to make a joke about it being the _journey_ that matters.” He looked entirely unamused by this.

World-builders. Gods – little-case ‘g’, though possibly, just possibly, it might directly be God; but God was in everything and it usually made little sense to ascribe things to Him in mundane terms. If this was the same – then little-g gods. “You’re saying no short-cuts.”

“Essentially,” Tony agreed, and grimaced. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but – yeah. Sorry. I know better than to let other people use untested shit. I should’ve taken more time to sort through all the scans before trying it. I – panicked.” The last word was almost a mutter.

“You kept it together and you got us out,” Steve said firmly. “You were operating under pressure and with limited information – you did fine. Great, actually.” Give credit where credit was due – he couldn’t even remember what had happened, but the mountains felt distinctly ominous, and Tony had managed to get them all out alive and unharmed.

But if Tony couldn’t build them a vehicle... damn. It felt like they had been gone only a day, but really it had been almost a week. How much longer would the journey take by foot? It could be weeks, months, _years_.  And if they were gone too long, they might not have anything to come back to – when Steve had gone world-hopping, time had passed at the same rate. Although, Tony had said that when he’d fallen through the portal, he’d been gone for months – yet it had been an instant in their world.

Tony was still looking apologetic, though – worried. But then, to him – what had it been like, nightmares looming at the edge of sight and everyone else acting like mindless –

\- zombies?

“You okay?” Steve asked him, noting the way that Tony’s eyes slid away ever so slightly. “You, uh – still look tired.”

“And I shouldn’t be,” Tony said, dipping his head. It hadn’t been what Steve had meant – but it was a valid concern. “I know. And no, no idea why – ah, bad phrase. Plenty of _ideas_ why, and no firm facts throw any of them out. It could be this world, it could be this _place,_ specifically. Maybe those things back in the mountains – maybe some other things. Hell, maybe extremis interferes with the curse.” He chuckled, low in his throat. “I haven’t been re-embodied long enough to know.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“We?” Tony’s lips quirked down and his eyes went opaque; Steve didn’t have a clue what he was thinking. “Yeah, guess so.”

 

 

 

“In times past, emperors who had lost their way and forgotten the Mandate of Heaven sought to extend their borders beyond those rightfully granted to civilization,” said Tripitaka. Steve half-listened, half-ignored him; it was quickly becoming habit. The sun was beating down on them from overhead, and although the suit Tony had made for him breathed like a dream, Steve would be sweating even if he stripped completely naked.

“They expanded the empire far beyond, attempting to tame the untameable lands. They did not seek to explore and learn, but to conquer and educate creatures long placed beyond the reach of reason and logic.” Tripitaka sighed mournfully. “And so now it is that the Great Empire contains expanses beyond what mortals may patrol, and there are regions such as those mountains to plague all travellers and tax-collectors. But my namesake faced these dangers bravely and overcame them. I am a sad imitation, I know. You did very well to keep us safe, my disciple.”

It took a second to process that Tripitaka was talking _to Tony_ , and then –

“Shut up,” said Steve, reaching out and grabbing one of Yulong’s packs without thinking; fortunately, Yulong immediately stopped in his tracks, hooves almost skidding across the stone as he did, as otherwise Steve would have been yanked off his feet. Tony reacted slower and stopped further away.  “Shut up. You don’t call him that. He isn’t your disciple. We’re doing you a favour, but you do _not_ talk to him like that.”

Tripitaka was very pale as he looked down at Steve. But he was looking _down_ at Steve – Yulong shied away, dancing sideways, and it was as good as a declaration of where his loyalties lay.

“I’m not going to be a coward,” Tripitaka said, his voice higher-pitched but still determined. “I’m not going to dishonour my namesake. Tony Stark did well; I am showing him respect. _You_ could stand to learn some.”

“I have plenty of respect for people who aren’t torturers.”

 _“Steve, shut_ up,”said Tony, but it was too late.

“Most ignorant of souls are those with no wish to learn,” said Tripitaka. “ _I_ may not be able to force anyone to learn, but Holy Kuan-Yin has granted me the favour of a Bodhisattva; if I must use it, then I must. If you love your friend, you will learn. If he doesn’t, perhaps you should reconsider your choice in friends.” He directed this last to Tony, and he had the gall to sound regretful.

“Honest to god, I think I’d rather die,” said Tony, the helmet dissolving around his head. All the lines of his forty-something years had returned, alien on his too-youthful face; the pale gold circlet winked bright in the sunlight. “But since I’d rather not spend the rest of my life screaming and _then_ die, let’s just, uh, not overreact – y’know, a better way to teach people is talking with them, it’s the – in thing, these days...”

 _Don’t_ , Steve chanted to himself, all his self-restraint teetering on the edge of breaking. He wanted to _end_ Tripitaka, raise his shield and prevent him from ever threatening anyone again – but he couldn’t. Helplessness seared at him like acid, an almost physical pain, but Steve knew it was nothing, _nothing_ compared to what would happen to Tony if he couldn’t keep his damn mouth _shut._

“One may speak to a stone from dawn to dusk, and not a word shall it comprehend,” said Tripitaka, looking at Steve.

“I’m not a rock,” Steve said, his words coming out stilted. _Don’t._ _Don’t slip_. “I – apologize. We should keep moving.”

“Mhmph,” said Tripitaka, still looking put out. Petulant. Watching him didn’t keep Steve from seeing Tony’s expression flash to a mix of disappointment and relief, before he blanked it out and the helmet flashed over his head again.

It was harder to lend an ear to Tripitaka after that. He wanted to just shut the odious monk out entirely – but if he missed some hidden threat in Tripitaka’s ‘lessons’, what then? It was Steve’s who had insisted on helping Tripitaka in the first place – he hadn’t seen any threat then. He couldn’t regret the instinct to help a stranger in need, but he could sure as hell regret not being able to tell that Tripitaka _wasn’t_.

The road wound slowly down out of the hilly country, and into flatter lands; Steve let the anger carry him, putting the familiar rage to familiar use. Anger at himself. Anger at being helpless in the face of a bully. He took it out against the road, because he couldn’t stop Tripitaka, and it wasn’t the face he wanted to present to the world – it wasn’t what he wanted to be, not even for an instant... and they were nearing other people. Cultivated land began to replace the flats and irrigation ditches now bordered the road. But there appeared to not be a single other soul _present_ , until far off in the distance Steve’s eyes caught movement; slowly, he managed to pick out a figure through the heat haze. Small, probably human-ish, carrying something.

 _“Oo-kay, that looks unfriendly,”_ muttered Tony on the comm.

“What are you seeing?”

_“Way too many arms. And teeth. In places teeth should not be. Jesus, I should have downloaded some Lovecraft, too.”_

“Could be friendly.”

“It is very impolite to have a one-sided conversation,” Tripitaka said peevishly, and Steve bit down on his tongue until he tasted copper.

“It’s faster, and might be necessary to protect you,” he gritted out, feeling no remorse about the lies – although they could be true in some cases. It accomplished the goal of getting Tripitaka to stop protesting, which was all Steve really cared about.

They drew closer, Yulong falling behind by Steve’s signal. “Could be friendly anyway,” Steve reminded Tony. “We’re not here to pick a fight.”

 _“Sure.”_ Tony didn’t bother to hide his skepticism.

But as they drew closer, the wavering shape resolved into the form of an ordinary-looking woman – no extra arms or teeth to be seen. She was dressed in a style that, though unfamiliar, looked like it was probably pretty common for the region – sandals, wide-brimmed hat, clothing that looked to be made from coarse-woven but sturdy cloth. The thing she was carrying turned out to be a large, shallow basket filled with – straw? Reeds? Something like that; what exactly it was, Steve wasn’t sure, but it was hardly threatening. Nothing about her was. “Your sensors functioning right?” Steve asked, because Tony hadn’t sounded like he was just kidding.

 _“Diagnostics coming up green,”_ Tony reported after a moment.

“There’s nothing about her that looks unusual to me.”

 _“Um._ Her?” asked Tony, and then part of the faceplate melted away, revealing his eyes for just a second before it returned to normal. _“Not sure how you get ‘her’ out of_ that _.”_

“Tony, she’s a normal-looking woman,” Steve said, worry ratcheting up.

They were near enough now that they began to slow their own pace. He wondered if they might just pass on the road – she to her side, they to theirs – and avoid any sort of confrontation entirely; but the looks she was giving them were wide-eyed, and she pushed back her hat a bit, openly staring.

 _“Christ on a popsicle stick,”_ Tony muttered in Steve’s ear, and that was the other half of it.

“Good afternoon, travellers,” the woman called when she was perhaps twenty feet away, and Steve remembered – _please let it not be too late –_ the declaration.

“Good afternoon,” he called back. “I’m Steve Rogers and this is Tony Stark – ”

 _“Are you insane?”_ Tony demanded.  

“ – and behind us are Tripitaka and Yulong. We’re just passing through, although if there’s a town nearby we could buy supplies at, we’d like to.” They all came to a halt, as if by mutual agreement, at about ten feet apart.

Tony was swearing in his ear, vicious and unsurprisingly inventive, and Steve would have responded if he’d had the same luxury of being able to say whatever he wanted and only be heard by those he intended to hear it. Since that wasn’t the case, he settled for shooting Tony a look – hopefully not one that would appear conspiratorial or threatening to the woman.

“I am Jun, and my village is not far beyond,” the woman introduced herself. “Would you like me to walk back with you and introduce you?”

 _“I don’t think so,”_ Tony said, before Steve could say, ‘Yes, thank you.’ The armour’s voice was always harder than Tony’s normal speaking voice, but this was unusually curt even so. Steve barely concealed a flinch of surprise.

“You should approach it cautiously, then,” Jun warned. “We see many travellers upon the road, but you must have come farther than any of them, to wear such strange clothing.” Her expression brimmed with curiosity.

“Pretty far,” Steve agreed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tony’s head turn toward him, ever so slightly and back.

“Then fair fortune to you. Perhaps I shall see you this evening,” Jun said, bowing her head in what seemed like some sort of farewell gesture. She began to step to one side, and collapsed with a gaping hole burned through her chest, large enough to reveal the white of the road beneath her.

Steve ducked and spun away, shouting, “Tony, move!” Awareness prickled on his skin; he was horribly aware of just how exposed they were on the road as he scanned for their attacker, or attackers – and then his brain caught up to his reflexes, figured out the jarring half-familiarity of the sound, processed that the split-second beam of light hadn’t  originated from _behind_ Tony.

Tony had upgraded his repulsors, some back portion of Steve’s brain catalogued. He was too used to hearing the whine of them charging, to having that split-second warning that Tony was about to act; he hadn’t immediately realized, despite the not-so-different sound of them actually firing, that it had been Tony who had killed her.

Tony still had his hand raised, the repulsor lens in his palm glowing faintly; he cocked his head to one side, and said, _“Okay, that was easier than I expected.”_

“Tony, _what the hell?”_

 _“Usually otherworldly creatures are tougher,”_ Tony said, like that explained _anything at all –_

“She wasn’t a threat, she was being helpful – she was completely harmless,” Steve said, horrified. He took a few steps forward and knelt down at Jun’s side, trying not to gag from the stench of burned flesh. The last time he’d smelled this – _no, God damn you, Tony. No._ Her final expression was eyes-wide-open shock – she probably hadn’t even had time to realize what had happened to her.

 _“She was threatening to_ eat _you!”_

Steve paused. Tony being paranoid and metaphoric, or was that meant to be literal? “Tony, that is not what was going on.”

_“It was pretty damn explicit, Steve – ”_

“ – then we weren’t hearing the same conversation. We were seeing different things before, too.” Steve gestured at him. “Play it back.”

The sound quality of the recording was perfect – the only reason that the armour’s voice was so different from Tony’s was that he wanted it to be. Jun’s voice was exactly the same, as if the clock had been rewound by two minutes and they were having the conversation over again, except it was recording-Steve replying in his place.

“That’s the same thing I heard the first time,” Steve said grimly. He looked back down at Jun, reached out, and gently closed her eyes.

_“Then you’re still hearing wrong, and I’d think the lack of an obvious – what are you doing?”_

“I’m trying to show her some damn respect,” Steve snapped.

“ _Steve – there’s nothing there.”_ Tony walked slowly toward him, placing his feet without caution –

“Stop – ” Steve tried to warn him, but when Tony did, he set his foot down just far enough to clip the fingers of Jun’s sprawled out arm. The boot crushed them without resistance.

Hooves clattered against the road; Steve looked up and saw Yulong and Tripitaka heading toward them.

 _“There’s no body, I shot her and she vanished,”_ said Tony. _“What the hell are you seeing?”_

“Oh my,” said Tripitaka faintly as Yulong trotted up and pulled to a halt, whinnying. “What happened?”

“What do you see?” Steve asked him.

“That you have slain this young woman with your weapon of light,” Tripitaka said. He looked nauseous. “Why?”

_“Because she was about to bite Steve’s head off.”_

“We’re seeing different things.” Steve shook his head. “Which of us is right?” He had to stand, after that; he couldn’t kneel by Jun’s corpse and say such a thing. It was like making a mockery of it.

“I see a dead woman,” said Tripitaka. Yulong nodded.

Steve winced. He didn’t want to agree with Tripitaka, but... “Tony?”

 _“You were the ones affected by the mountains, not me,”_ Tony countered flatly. Of course, the armour’s voice was always pretty flat, but even so Steve thought he would have sounded the same with the faceplate up. If the mountains were even related – they’d left them behind hours ago, and in this place, that could mean a lot.

“We got – ” he searched for a word, “ – knocked out or something. You’re the only one who _saw_ anything in there. Shadows.”

Tony was silent for a moment. _“Things that didn’t want to be seen. I can think of a hell of a lot of reasons why something like_ that _thing wouldn’t want to be seen – why it’d hide as a shadow, or a woman. An illusion that works on you...”_

“But if it was something aimed at us, you should have – sensor readings or something, right? So you could get an idea of what we’re seeing.” He glanced at Tripitaka and lowered his voice to sub-audible, so that nobody without enhanced hearing or sensitive microphones could have picked him up. “If you’re hallucinating again...”

 _“Granted that any complex system can have a breakdown, but this isn’t a relapse, Steve,”_ Tony replied in kind over the comm.

“Then give me another explanation!” Steve closed his eyes, scrunching them up to relieve a headache that he knew wasn’t real, even if the tension sure was.

“No matter what you saw, you can’t just go around killing people,” said Tripitaka from his high perch. “And that’s a person.”

 _“There is_ nothing there! _”_

Tripitaka took a nervous grip on the saddle pommel and looked directly at Steve. “Do not attempt to interfere,” he warned.

“NO – ” it was too late; Tripitaka had already started his mumbling chant and Tony collapsed beside Jun’s corpse. His screams were tiny, locked away inside the armour, but Steve could hear them even through it – Steve pulled Tripitaka off of Yulong’s back before the horse could shy away, and jammed his gloved hand between the monk’s teeth, enough to hold down his tongue.

Tony’s screaming didn’t stop. Tripitaka looked shocked, and then frightened, and then narrowed his eyes; his jaw kept moving, very slightly, twitches so small that Steve couldn’t stop him – and Tony’s screams exploded into a shocking loudness that had Steve taking his eyes off of Tripitaka to look over his shoulder. The armour half-collapsed off of Tony, parts of it melting away almost uncertainly; metal rained to the white road, leaving him naked. “ – off, off, off,” Tony was choking out, his eyes wild and staring into nothing, “ _No,_ please, off, _getitoff_!” He clawed at his head, opening bloody furrows at him temples.

If Steve tried anything else to stop Tripitaka, he was pretty sure he’d kill him. So he shoved Tripitaka away instead – strongly enough to send Tripitaka sprawling on the road, not strongly enough to injure him – and lunged for Tony, grabbing at his wrists. Half-choking on his own screams, Tony didn’t seem to register that it was Steve – he fought back, thrashing against the hold so much that Steve had to haul him up, for fear he’d brain himself on the stone.

Tripitaka’s near-silent mumble stopped, and Tony went limp.

“Don’t do it again,” said Tripitaka, and his words were small and petty and _evil_ over the sound of Tony sobbing for breath. He stared down at them, an uncomfortable expression on his face, like he fucking _cared_ – Steve grit his teeth so hard he thought, for a moment, he might have cracked one.

 _“_ Oh god fuck no I swear I won’t,” Tony mumbled, all in one breath, and tugged weakly at his arms; Steve let him go instantly. Tripitaka nodded once, and looked to Jun’s body. One of Tony’s bare feet was now poking her in the thigh – and unlike when Tony was wearing the boots, this time his foot had clearly met resistance. Steve didn’t say anything.

“She needs _some_ sort of funeral,” Tripitaka said at last. “That I can provide. Carry her over to the side of the road, Steve. We can bury her there.”

Beside the ditch. Jun had a village – she probably had friends, family. They should be taking her body back to them. Perhaps they’d be arrested and tried for murder – Tony was guilty of it. If it wasn’t _them_ hallucinating – but how could it be, all three of them, awake and aware? That was different from being put to sleep by a spell. If there was an illusion that they could see, then Tony should still have been able to _detect_ it, somehow.

Extremis had broken the mind of every single other person who had taken it – that Tony had gotten off with no ill effects... it had seemed too good to be true.

If Tony’d relapsed – he’d need help. Care. And oversight. Not Tripitaka’s godforsaken idea of punishment. He couldn’t risk trapping Tony in that – not when it was his fault that they’d stopped and helped Tripitaka in the first place. And that was ignoring the multitudes of people depending on Tony to fabricate a cure – or at least, some way to shut extremis down.

But they couldn’t just leave Jun’s body out here to rot. It _would_ rot swiftly, in this heat and humidity.

The fallen pieces of the armour twitched, and began reassembling on Tony’s body. “Go,” he muttered thickly. “Do whatever you... think you need to do.”

Steve closed his eyes, and took a breath, doing his damndest to keep himself from reaching out to his friend. When he opened them again, Tony was watching him warily – almost flinching back at the smallest movement.

That wasn’t fair – and what a damned selfish thing to think. Steve bit his tongue. None of this was fair.

The dirt beside the road was soft and easy to move. He made the grave as deep as he could without letting it get below the waterline of the nearest trench, and packed the dirt overtop of her body as tight as he could manage; there was no easy source of rocks nearby he could use to make something more secure. But these were cultivated lands – hopefully there wouldn’t be predators digging around. Although that brought to mind that these _were_ cultivated lands, despite the lack of houses... so where were the people?

He retreated back to the road, and Tony, not watching while Tripitaka performed whatever rites over the grave that he felt appropriate. “Are there any other people or... other things showing up on your sensors?” he asked Tony quietly.

There was no hesitation before the reply. _“No.”_

“These fields don’t look abandoned.” Granted, none of them had anything growing in them at the moment, but the corners were neat and straight, and there weren’t any weeds, either. Wasn’t that a thing that farmers did – leave fields fallow for a bit, a chance to... rest? He wasn’t sure. “There oughtta be people around here somewhere.”

 _“Maybe they were all eaten,”_ Tony said curtly, and Steve looked away.

After another twenty minutes of travel, though, they finally started seeing signs of people – the occasional small shack, then the occasional house and sometimes workers far off in the fields. Sometimes, one would occasionally look up and stare at them as they passed, but none approached any closer to the road. The fields here were different – some were full of green crops, some were flooded, and the water level in the ditches varied so much that there had to be some sort of weirdness going on, because otherwise the water certainly should have been moving. Instead it looked almost stagnant.

“Can you see those people?” Steve asked Tony quietly.

 _“Three o’clock, three hundred forty metres; eleven o’clock, eight hundred twelve meters; eight o’clock, four hundred ninety-one meters,”_ Tony listed off. There had been others, but – Steve glanced back. He couldn’t see them anymore. But these ones, at least, they could both see.

Another ten minutes later, they finally found the village. Half of it seemed to be built of stone, and the other half from some sort of plant growing up over all the buildings, forming rooftops and the occasional second story. There were more decorations on display, here, and more people about: most dressed as farmers, but others in fancier clothing, with more colour and life to them. It was larger than the village they’d come across Tripitaka in, and they were in luck – there even seemed to be some sort of marketplace currently set up in the middle of the village, centered around an elaborately carved, beautiful stone fountain.

“I must go present my passport to the local authorities,” said Tripitaka, making to climb down from Yulong’s back; Steve caught him before he could face-plant, and set him on his feet as quickly as possible, cursing himself all the while. “Oh. Er, thank you. You should go buy supplies – as a monk, I cannot barter.”

“And what do we do if the local authorities want _our_ passports?” Steve asked pointedly.

“State who you are and that you travel with me,” Tripitaka said, frowning at Steve like this was the most obvious thing in the world and Steve clearly should have known it.

“Right,” said Steve slowly. Letting Tripitaka out of his sight felt like a bad idea – but, damnit, Tripitaka was the one who’d wanted to come along with them in the first place; he wasn’t going to run off on them. And even if he _did_ decide to – they could keep going just fine. Hopefully. Unless Tripitaka decided to be vengeful.

 _“Come on, Cap, I can’t haggle worth a damn,”_ Tony muttered over the comm, and, well, that settled it.

Of course, it would’ve been a lot easier to haggle if he’d had any idea of how much his money was worth. Or if he could understand the signs – the language might sound like English, but it sure wasn’t written anything like it. The elaborate characters looked like they’d have been at home on the signs he’d seen in Shenzhen.  

“Fresh fruit?” one stall owner asked him, though none of the things on her table were anything that Steve could identify. Hopefully none of them would be poisonous – although he was probably a little late to be worrying about poisonous alien food. “Only five half-slates each, and they are quite delicious. Picked just this morning!”

“Uh, not at the moment,” he told her awkwardly, not dimming her salesperson’s smile. “I’ll be back later.” He could pick out the haggling that others were doing elsewhere – though it was difficult; people here seemed to speak much more rapid-fire when they got down to business. Fresh fruit was going to be a luxury, though: if they weren’t guaranteed to come across villages often, then they needed supplies that would keep.

 _“Heads up, Steve, we got trouble,”_ Tony’s voice pulled him away from eavesdropping on one man haggling with another selling some sort of nuts. _“Take a look – five o’clock, approaching the government building.”_ Tony himself was standing facing the same direction as Steve, but given his sensors, that was deceptive.

There were enough people around to cover his own movements a bit – even though he stood a good half-head taller than most of them – and he took advantage of that to turn casually. The ornamented building that Tripitaka had made his way into had the occasional person passing in and out, and more people using the street before it to make their way to and from the market, but he didn’t see anybody who stood out. “What is it?”

 _“You don’t see it. Of course you don’t see it.”_ Tony shook his head and began walking with a purposeful stride toward the building, sending other market-goers hurrying out of his way, and doubling the number of open stares they were getting. _“It’s the same creature – same number of tentacles, same number of goddamned_ teeth _– I am not hallucinating this.”_

“No lethal force,” said Steve, catching up to him and putting a hand on his arm; Tony shook it off and kept walking, leaving Steve little choice but to follow. “Don’t start a fight here, Tony.” For one, he might kill (another) innocent person. For another, these people might all look like farmers or merchants, but there was no guarantee that they didn’t have police or soldiers. And on top of that, there was what Tripitaka might do to Tony.

 _“Hey, I wish I could be all for it eating Tripitaka, but sadly that doesn’t seem like it’d work out well for me,”_ Tony said tightly. They reached the edge of the market, and Steve could tell now by Tony’s determined focus which person he thought the monster was: a young woman coming up the road with a covered basket balanced on her head. Another young woman – for a moment, the world tipped and everything felt inevitable.

No. Steve shook his head and planted himself in front of Tony, one hand on the chestplate, ready to try physically holding him back – it wouldn’t actually work, but he had to get through to Tony somehow. “You can’t do this, Tony. There is no threat here – even if you’re seeing something that looks monstrous, it’s not doing anything. _She’s_ not doing anything.”

Of course, Tripitaka stepped out of the building at that exact second.

Steve caught sight of him out of the corner of his eye. Tony, facing that direction – and probably with cameras trained on that doorway anyway – shoved Steve’s arm aside hard enough to knock him off balance, and took a running leap, assisted by a flare from his boot repulsors, that took him over Tripitaka’s head to land firmly between him and the woman. _“Back off,”_ he threatened.

“What?” the startled woman asked, nearly dropping her basket. She took one hand off of it, outstretching it placating.

“What?” said Tripitaka at the same time, as Steve, lunging forward, pulled Tripitaka behind him.

“Go back inside,” he snapped at Tripitaka.

 _“Feel free to go away and stop_ stalking _us anytime,”_ Tony snarled in the Iron Man’s foreboding voice.

The woman shrunk backward. “I don’t mean you any harm – I don’t know who you are, I’m just going to market – ”

“Tony, for God’s sake – ” Steve grabbed at Tony’s shoulder and tried to step in front of him, but Tony just stepped to the side.

_“What the hell are you?”_

“I’m just a farmer – I sell goods here every market day, any can vouch for me – ” the woman babbled.

“Has he gone mad again?” asked Tripitaka.

Tony slid one foot forward, into better combat stance; Steve was helpless to keep him from moving, like he was just a ninety-pound weakling again. _“Over my dead body.”_

“And over mine, you’re not killing her,” Steve ordered him.

“Do not do this, Tony,” said Tripitaka, and Tony flinched, turning his head back to look at the monk.

_“Stay out of this, Jim Jones, I’m trying to save your life.”_

The woman’s voice was trembling; Steve couldn’t see her, couldn’t take his eyes off of Tony to turn his heard and look, but he’d have been willing to bet that the rest of her was shaking, too. “I don’t understand – why am I in trouble?”

“Tony – ”

 _“They’ll believe me when I – ”_ Steve was suddenly supporting Tony’s weight; he could hear Tony screaming inside the armour again, too faintly, and Tripitaka’s mumbling, almost as faint.

He lowered Tony to the ground and snarled up at Tripitaka, “Stop!”

Tripitaka paused, and asked Tony sternly, “Will you stop attacking people? I shall have to punish you further each time you try.”

“Can I – pass by you? I’m late,” the woman asked Steve in a small voice.

 _“Too bad for you – I’m not exactly – obedient,”_ Tony grit out, and exploded into motion.

It caught Steve off guard. He’d been prepared for Tony to move, but he hadn’t expected how– the nanite-made armour was strong, fast, but he hadn’t expected _how_ fast when applied against himself... or rather, he wasn’t expecting how much extremis must have enhanced Tony’s reaction times, because whenever they’d sparred before, Tony’s greatest weakness had always been that he was an un-enhanced human being inside the suit; he had _good_ reflexes, but Steve’s were superhuman.

Now, apparently, so were Tony’s. He twisted over, pulling from Steve’s grasp, and before Steve could grab back onto him, ruin his shot by tangling him up with Steve’s own body and the shield, he’d already fired twice. Muffled thumps behind Steve, and the smell of burnt flesh, told him that at least one shot had gone home.

“What have you done?” cried Tripitaka, and began to chant, his mumbling harsher now with grief and anger, and Tony screamed, and screamed, and screamed –

“Stop it!” Steve shouted at Tripitaka, “You’re not helping!”

“Murder!” cried one of the passerby, and another, “Fetch the guard!”

“He must learn,” Tripitaka paused in his chant long enough to say, and then he was back to it – the armour did not collapse off of Tony this time, but his limbs were seizing in it, making it twitch and scrape against the road.

“We don’t have a guard!” cried someone else, and, “The mayor!”

“Foreigners! They’ve killed a woman!”

An pair of officials – or at least they looked like officials, wearing robes far more ceremonial than anything anyone else was wearing – poked their heads out of the doorway of the government building. Steve took little note of them. He stood and crossed over to Tripitaka, and placed his hand firmly over the little man’s mouth, almost firmly enough to break his jaw – and tipped his head back so Steve could glare into his eyes directly. It was not enough. Something incandescent within him wanted to snap Tripitaka’s neck, but he – _could – not_ –

“That is _enough_ ,” Steve ordered, and Tripitaka stopped trying to struggle against him and instead began to nod.

Steve let him go, and knelt down by Tony. The armour was motionless; he couldn’t hear Tony screaming anymore, but the armour was shielded enough that he couldn’t hear Tony breathing, either. He damn sure _hoped_ that Tony was still breathing. “Tony?” he murmured, placing one hand against the chest plate.

“What has happened?” one of the officials cried. “Who has killed this woman?”

“It was that armoured man!” shouted somebody, who was immediately agreed with by half a dozen other voices.

“What shall we do? We don’t have a guard,” the male official said to his female counterpart.

“We’ll have to send to the city for aid...”

“That could be months.”

“Execute him!” suggested an onlooker, and was greeted with too much enthusiasm.

“Tony, damn it, are you alive?” Steve muttered, bending over him, but keeping a wary eye on the crowd around them. They were rapidly turning into a mob. Tony needed – to be locked up, yes, but he needed care – he wasn’t in his right mind – if they’d all been human, he’d have had an idea what to say, how to convince them to let reason prevail, but these people’s customs were so alien that Steve had no idea where to start.

 _“...ow,”_ came the reply, very faintly, over the comm.

“We have no executioner,” said the female official. “One must be appointed by the queen.”

“I have an alternate solution,” said Tripitaka, stepping forward. “This man is a pilgrim on the road to Maklu, one of my disciples. Clearly he is unworthy of the position, and I must humbly apologize to this village for allowing him so far. But I have power over him that I may send him away, and order him to avoid all civilized lands; and so he may not take the road again in this lifetime. Will that be a suitable punishment instead?”

“To be banned from the road would be a fate much worse than death,” said the female official. “But as it is for only one lifetime then it is not over-harsh. Very well. I accept this punishment as fair, honoured monk.”

“As do I,” declared the other official. “But only if you all leave immediately.”

“Up,” Steve muttered to Tony, and pulled him to his feet; Tony staggered slightly, but seemed able to keep his balance.

“Tony Stark,” Tripitaka said solemnly, “I hereby cast you out; you are no longer my disciple.”

 _“Yippee.”_ Tony still sounded dazed.

“Do not return to this road,” he continued. “And if I hear of you killing anyone else, then I shall recite the mantra of tightening at every dawn, noon, and dusk for nine years. Go.”

Tony might be able to keep his feet, but it wasn’t clear that he could walk on his own; Steve kept a careful hand on his arm as he turned them around. It was hard to keep an incredulous expression off of his face. Tripitaka was just going to _let them go_ –

“Not you, Steve,” Tripitaka ordered. “I still need a disciple to protect me – you’ll remain.”

 _Damnit._ “I’m going with him.”

“Then I’ll recite it until you come back,” Tripitaka said petulantly.

 _“Stay with him,”_ Tony commed. _“Steve, stay. I’ll be fine – I need to figure this out.”_

“You need _help_ ,” Steve told him, voice low.

“He needs to reflect on his crimes and not commit any more,” said Tripitaka.

 _“Then I’ll find someplace I can get it – keep away from people, Steve. If I’m wrong, I’ve killed two people. But I’m not. There is some_ thing _hunting us – hunting_ you _.”_

“I said leave immediately, not at your leisure,” complained the official.

Tony shrugged off Steve’s hand as Tripitaka told Steve, “You can start by finding Yulong.”

“Tony – splitting up is the worst thing we could do!”

 _“But there’s no alternative. I’ll be back.”_ He stepped away, back toward the east. _“Steve – be careful.”_

“Promise the same,” Steve murmured, as Tony engaged the repulsors and rose from the ground – slowly, but gaining speed with altitude. Steve watched him long enough for him to almost disappear from view, and caught the small cone that formed a moment later. Seconds later, the sonic boom ripped through the village.

“A powerful magician,” said the female official, shaken. “You are certain he will obey you, honoured monk?”

“Yes,” said Tripitaka, although he _sounded_ less than certain. “May we collect supplies before we leave?”

“If it will get you away sooner, then yes,” she agreed. “Brother, will you see to the body?”

The other official nodded unhappily. Steve closed his eyes. _Oh Lord our God, please keep watch over her soul, and let her end up somewhere safe – wherever that is for her. Forgive me my failure. Forgive Tony. I know he deserves to do penance for it, but – he’s ill. Please, let him get better. We need him – the entire Earth needs him. He’s the only one who can tell the Makluans exactly what happened to extremis. He’s a good man – he’s trying his best. Please._

Then he went to find Yulong.

 

 

 

Elevation: 1934.1  
External temperature: 282  
Distance from S. Rogers: 23015 

Distance from S. Rogers: 91833

Distance from S. Rogers: ERROR

_run builder.xtrms; open tstark.exe_

Warning: may cause fatal error.

_abort_

_run memrepair.exe; open 2014003011354.mem; debug_

...  
...  
No errors detected.

_open 2014003011355.mem; debug_

...  
...  
...  
No errors detected.

...

...

_exit memrepair.exe_

_open tstark.exe_

Warning: may cause fatal error.

_ignore_

_debug_

...  
...

object 3D.real unknown4201:  
       distanceR 3119;  
       distanceTh 30.3;  
       distancePh 19.2;

...

Warning: memory low

...

Warning: terminal loop detected

call.warningloop on core2

Warning: terminal loop detected

call.text on core3 .text call.warningloop on core3 text warning: terminal lo.0000000000000000

 

Reset complete.

Elevation: 0  
External temperature: 283  
Distance from S. Rogers: ERROR

Warning: loop detected

call.emotion.30498 on core2:  
       startNum 199113237882;  
       resourceAllocation 39139230;  
       call currentHappy(numSero, numYay);  
       eval(startNum,currentHappy);  
       ...

.thought shit OFF

_shit OFF_

call.cmdconfirm on core 4

.text Confirm: shit

Confirm: shit

.thought no

_no_

call.cmdconfirm on core 4

.text Confirm: OFF

Confirm OFF

.thought _nonononono_

_nonononono_

Warning: terminal loop detected

call.text on core 4

.thought stop

_stop_

Debug halted. Debug is incomplete.

_close_

Builder closed.

_ thank fuck _

“That was really stupid,” Tony whispered to himself, letting his head thunk backward against the ground. The words echoed close inside the helmet – close, except for how they might have been a million miles away outside his head. He’d done more examining of his thoughts in the last few weeks than he had in an entire lifetime before then – literal examination, the kind only possible when you could print the code for your memories on your eyelids like a report on a screen. Compared to that, spoken words were... distant.

“Still an idiot.” He pulled himself to his feet and groaned; wherever he’d crashed, it wasn’t the side of the road like he’d been hoping.  _run blockpain0001.patch_

Warning: System critical operations may be affected

_ignore_

Idiot. Unsurpassed familiarity with himself aside, it was still stupid to try looking his own thoughts in realtime. He should have shut off more of his higher processes, first, just looked at the error analysis. He ought to be doing that _now_ – it was the only way to really be sure that the problem wasn’t anything with _him_. Logic said it wasn’t, gut instinct (ones and zeroes in the end, but whether they were biological or mimicked through extremis, he still didn’t know how a lot of the deeper functions _worked_ ) said it wasn’t – but complex systems were prone to fail, especially those designed by humans.

_good thing I’m not quite human anymore, then_

_..._

_shut up_

And now he was arguing with himself. Great. He appended a sarcastic smiley face to the chat-log of his thoughts.

It was a bad distraction from the real problem, which was that he wasn’t willing to just shut himself down to safemode and do a full system scan. Not yet. Maybe not ever. So, plan B then – assume he was right and go find some external evidence of it.

“I like this plan,” Tony murmured to himself. Then he made a face. “I need to stop talking to myself. Aloud. Shit. SHUT UP!” _stopstopstopstopstop_

The headband refused to listen, instead keeping up its deceptively cheerful hum.

“Come on, Steve,” he whispered. “No words of wisdom for me?”

_run memview.exe; open 2014031101355hce.mem_

“Oh, now this is a _delicious_ scene.” 

“Good afternoon. I’m Steve Rogers and this is Tony Stark – ”

_“Are you insane?”_

“ – and behind us are Tripitaka and Yulong. We’re just passing through, although if there’s a town nearby we could buy supplies at, we’d like to.” 

“How did you make it so far without someone snapping you up? I am fortunate indeed this day.” 

_“I don’t think so.”_

“A traveller who refuses aid freely given – are you cautious, then, or reckless, to refuse me so easily? You have not left the mountains far behind, mortal.” 

“Pretty far.” 

“Far enough to make your flesh exquisitely exotic. I’m going to enjoy sucking on your bones.” 

_pause_

Mountains it was. He walked forward, and his brain split into pieces; immediately a half-dozen warnings popped up about emotional compromise. He ignored them except to apply the standard patch he’d been using. Extremis, for all its tendency to turn people into zombies, was ludicrously redundant with its warnings; he wouldn’t have thought Maya would take Windows Vista as a good role model, but every programmer had their blind spots.

The bits of his brain attended to their separate tasks, sending out hundreds, thousands of commands that made stepping from the ground into flight one smooth motion.

_run plotter; open maklu.map_

His eyes were still pretty normal, but the suit’s sensors saw across the broad EM spectrum, and in a couple other spectrums besides; the ultra-dense dimensional contortions of the world around him gave off their own form of ripples, data that he could crunch down in real time, although it took up a significant amount of his available memory. Course plotted, he zigzagged through spacetime and angled for the road again – it was still the shortest route to where he wanted to go. But that _wasn’t_ Maklu.

Tony didn’t quite land – instead, in the last second before he’d have made contact, extremis-powered nanobots rolled down, mass transferring from armour plating to his feet, and forming into wheels; the repulsors shifted up and back to align with his heels.

“You’re saying no short-cuts.” 

“Essentially,” Tony agreed, and grimaced. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but – ” 

_stop_

The subconsciously-called memory halted, instantly obedient. It was even more of a relief than the headache blocking program. Extremis allowed him to organize his thoughts, manage them on a level that he’d never been able to before – _forced_ him to do so, actually, because the downside of a more complicated system was that it really was more delicate, and if he didn’t keep his mind in order he wound up babbling at himself like he had been a second ago. Business as usual, but now with recursive loops to turn it from ‘annoying’ to ‘serious problem’. 

Pepper would have laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

_stop_

Vectors, forces, moments; subconscious calculation of how his body ought to move to avoid falling over was no longer quite so subconscious. The numbers running in the back of his brain were his to access at any point he pleased; he didn’t have to start from scratch to know where a value was coming from, he just needed to bring the process to the fore. His body leaned forward and balanced, the repulsors fired, and he went jet-booting down the road at approximately the same speed as a Japanese bullet-train going flat-out.

The road threw off readings, too, way more complex than the dimensional shenanigans that this place cooked up. Not something that he could analyze in real-time; not without a hell of a lot more assumptions than he knew how to make right now. But if there was one thing he’d learned from those oh-god-awful days in the mountains, trying to get Steve to keep walking and to eat without drooling, it was that the jet boots did work.

But he couldn’t have carried Steve. You had to walk the road yourself.

“Unless you’re Tripitaka,” Tony muttered aloud. “Fucking Tripitaka.” There was no commentary on this observation. The suit was silent, containing him, and only him –

_stop_

Or maybe it was because Yulong was a horse? That would actually explain why he was currently being a horse instead of a dragon.

“Oh Jesus, something about this place makes sense. Now I know I’m going crazy.”

Steve was really damn fast for a human, but bullet-trains weren’t human. Tony was aware of the nanobots stretched out on the road behind him, worn off the wheels – at the rate he’d been losing raw material this trip, there was a good chance he’d run through even his reserves before they got near Maklu... but that was a problem that continued to be a vague future worry, a pleasant logistical distraction. The nanoparticles he was losing weren’t particularly intelligent; he wasn’t sending any of his consciousness with them when they went.

When the mountains came into view, it was reflex to kick off and take to the air, approach it from up high – he didn’t need to allocate a near-crippling amount of resources to the plotter, not with the mountains acting like some sort of massive anti-warping object as soon as he got away from the road. Two relative seconds from the road, and the range had doubled in size; ten seconds, and he could no longer detect the far edge of it.

Somewhere in here were answers. He needed to find them, and _fast_ , before that thing came back again and ate Steve.

“Come on,” he whispered to himself. Slowing his thoughts down long enough to convert them to human-interpretable audio speech gave him plenty of time to think and to code; he tweaked parameters and started sending out active pings. If there were dragons patrolling up here, let them come and find him; he’d tell them his name and demand answers. “Come on, I aided the beggar – well, I didn’t stop Steve, anyway – and I’ve gotten nothing but shit for it. Gimme some fairy-tale karma here. You owe me.”

_I’m fucking_ praying _how is this my life I hate gods_

Gods were murder-happy, bloodstained pieces of –

_stop_

Gods were just highly-advanced aliens using highly-advanced tech, and science was what came through for him. Pings returned a hit on a large stone building nestled up against a cliff face a couple dozen kilometers off; Tony turned and hit supersonic in less than a breath, extremis allowing him to take what punishment from acceleration the armour couldn’t compensate for, and leaving him aching for more, to go _faster._ Flight in the suit had never been anything short of spectacular, but with extremis the suit was his skin, and there was nothing between him and the sky but his own thoughts.

He was going to be spending the rest of his life making up for extremis. Assuming that he survived trying to make up for Loki.

The building looked like some kind of fortress, or maybe an eastern monastery of some sort – sure, Tony had designed and built skyscrapers in his time, but ancient architecture wasn’t really his strong point, or his any kind of point, to be honest. He had to admire the way it was fastened on and into the cliff, though; a mathematician had been involved in that, and one hell of a geologist, judging from the deeper scans, the ones he had looking through rock, searching for monsters. Not that those had done him any good while trying to pinpoint the bastards the last time he’d been in these mountains, but he had to _try._

 _Monastery,_ he decided after scans revealed the presence of a number of men and women inside who all appeared to be wearing clothing similar to Tripitaka’s, except designed for colder weather. The way their heads were shaved –

_stop_

There were parts of the building that were blocked. Tony made note of that, then stopped splitting his conscious mind over so many processors, pulling himself back into real-time. He dropped to subsonic speeds and a moment later landed, a perfect three-pointer, in the main courtyard.

 _“My name is Tony Stark and I’d like to talk to somebody about the things that live in these mountains,”_ he announced before anyone could start breathing fire at him.

He waited. A moment later, a monk stuck his head out – her head? It was a bit difficult to tell, man or woman; then again it was hard to tell that he/she/they wasn’t (weren’t?) human, which was probably more to the point.

“Please, come inside,” the monk said politely, in a low alto voice. That was no help at all. He’d met a number of very lovely men and women who spoke in that register.

No fire-breathing. That was good. He kept the sensors on active-mode as he followed the monk through the low stone doorway; probably it was bad manners, but he’d had enough of being taken by surprise, thanks. He was at least courteous enough not to go looking through clothes and skin.

Bad manners or not, his scans didn’t go unnoticed. “There are many living things in these mountains,” the monk said, “but I think by your precautions that you do not refer to any of them.”

 _“Things that eat travellers. They hunt around the road.”_ Hopefully the monks here would make it quick so he wouldn’t have to cut them short by fleeing from their sudden but inevitable betrayal. Everybody who’d started out acting like they might help them in this place had ended up trying to screw them over – except maybe Yulong, but he liked Tripitaka, so the jury was still out on him.

“Those are not living creatures.”

_“Fine, then I’d like to talk to somebody about things that do their not-living in these mountains.”_

“Yes, I know,” the monk agreed. “The mountain air whispered of your passage – ” well, it wasn’t like he’d been subtle with the sensor sweeps. “He is expecting you.”

_right that’s not ominous_

They passed other monks in the halls, most recognizably men or women; none looked particularly interested in him. Exactly the opposite, in fact. They all completely avoided looking at him; it was enough to give a guy a complex.

They went further in, past the point where the fortress wall met the mountain-side, and his scans started throwing back garbage, senseless data – he saved it anyway, since it probably wasn’t garbage. He just didn’t have a big enough picture yet. He certainly wasn’t the only one running scans here – but their scans were all sub-terrestrial. How did they keep the signals from leaking into the air? With every step of his boots he could feel the amount of power they were sending out in those pulses, monitoring... what?

“Here,” said the monk, stopping as they came to a blank rock wall that every single aspect of extremis was insisting was a blank rock wall, except for his too-suspicious brain. Maybe the screwing-over part was due to come a little earlier this time around. But the monk motioned for Tony to keep walking. “He is beyond.”

_I need to figure out how they do this_

He stepped through slowly. It wasn’t entirely on purpose. Sure, he hadn’t planned to rush – had planned to give his sensors an extra few fractions of a second to pick up whatever was there. He hadn’t expected for it to be _there_ , there, all in his head, and he froze; then stumbled as he came out the other side. Raw data was dumped into long-term memory and sealed; he didn’t have time for that now. Not when he was faced with a... something. Not a dragon. Possibly what you would get if you cut off a pig’s head and stuck it on a dragon, except one without any of the shimmering scales or ethereality – a snake, then. One ten meters long and half a meter in diameter, with an oversized pig’s head stuck on it. It was curled over a cauldron full of – particle analysis told him _exactly_ what it was and, well, if he’d had to imagine what pigs ate, that would be it. Mush dripped down from its mouth as it raised its head, abandoning the slops, and settled its coils comfortably.

“Hello,” it said, in a bass voice so deep he’d have felt it in his skin even if he hadn’t had extra sensors embedded there.

 _“Hi.”_ Awkward. _“I’m told you can help me.”_

“The purpose of this monastery is to aid all lawful travellers.”

Well, crap. Ignore that for now. _“You’re kinda far from the road to be much help, don’t you think? I was travelling on it this whole last week, and you were distinctly not aiding.”_

“You continued to make progress despite our wards,” the pig-snake explained. It was frowning now, which on that face was an expression somewhere between hilarious and terrifying. “Anyone without a sage of sufficient power to protect them would have been turned back before they could encounter the demons. From our remote observations, I had thought you such a sage.”

_“Feel free to go away and stop_ stalking _us anytime.”_

“I think not. It’s been ages since I smelled anyone from so far away. And then there’s you... you aren’t a Great Sage, and yet you _can_ see me truly, can’t you?” 

_“Not exactly.”_

“No, that is obvious. If you were a sage you would not lack such basic knowledge.”

_“Great. How about you make me more sage-like and fill me in? I’m told it would be good for my spiritual health.”_

“I’m not sure to you it would matter,” said the pig-snake, swaying forward. Its eyes were two black points in its face, strangely mesmerizing. Something dripped from one fang – poison? It turned green as it hit the floor, spreading –

Unauthorized access detected.

_trace_

Like hell he was letting this thing _inside his head –_

“Ah,” breathed the pig-snake, a wash of fetid, rotting air; Tony quickly shut down half his particle analysis subroutines before they made him gag. “I see. Well, that’s an unusual way about the problem, most ingenious. I’m surprised whoever built you didn’t give you more information to ensure you could protect your charges, however.”

_what_

The trace was cut off as abruptly as if somebody had took scissors to it, _damn_ it. At least it took the unauthorized access with it.

 _“Nobody built me. Except maybe myself.”_ And Maya Hansen, but he’d cleared out enough of her programming – and Tem Borjigin, but thinking about that just made him feel ill – and apparently an alien dragon, but that didn’t matter, that wasn’t _him_. That was extremis, and extremis was an _upgrade_ , and _only_ an upgrade.

Somehow he didn’t get the idea that the pig-snake was talking about upgrades.

“There you are labouring under a misapprehension,” it told him. “Truly living things – _people_ – have souls – a sort of essence of themselves. The truth of their being. You do not. Ergo the demons shall not touch you, for they feast only upon living flesh; and you are immune to their particular magicks, which we here mimic to keep the demons imprisoned within the mountains, and unwary travellers out.”

_“What the hell are you?”_

“One of the old kind, mortal. All travellers upon the Great Road are my proper prey. You might be something else, but your friends are _mine_.” 

_“I have a soul,”_ Tony said, mind racing. Alternatony – he’d been _sure_ , and hell, he was more inclined to take his own word than this thing’s. _“It’s been cursed and everything.”_ Hel had offered him oblivion over it, he’d seen an afterlife – he had a soul.

“I’m sure you think you do,” said the pig-thing, making an expression that – dear god, was that supposed to be a smile? It sounded _indulgent_. “I’m beginning to think whomever built you wasn’t a particularly nice person.”  

_“Sir, I cannot perceive whatever it is that is causing you such distress.”_

“Does that mean you count as dead?” 

_“It more likely means you are incapable of programming me a soul.”_

This was bad. This was all of his backup plans shredded, if he couldn’t take down Loki first. He should have looked into that god-forsaken curse in more detail – if those options had been taken away from him now, he needed to know _when_ , _why_ – and he needed to know why the fuck he _cared_ so much, beyond all its practical implications. So souls were real – so what? Steve had seen a jewel, a gem, that let him look at souls – Steve was content to listen to a guy who said ‘it’s magic’ and not press for an explanation beyond that, what the hell did it matter, every version of JARVIS had been a person, who the fuck cared if he didn’t have a soul?

“You, uh – still look tired.” 

“And I shouldn’t be. I know.” 

_stop_

_“So I lost it at some point, that doesn’t mean I was_ built – ”

“A true consciousness cannot be separated from its soul,” said the pig-snake. “It would be like trying to separate a tree from its plant nature. You are very advanced for a proto-consciousness, however.” It said this like it was trying to console him.

_“Excuse me? I am a fucking human being, pal.”_

“I’m afraid not,” it disagreed. “Do you have any idea who built you? If they gave you no indication of your true state, then perhaps they were trying to replicate the consciousness of someone they knew.”

_what_

No, extremis had been _him_ –

\- crashing, metal protesting, the hum of ozone and electricity – 

_stop_

“The punishment for the misuse of sorcery is to deny its practice to the miscreant.” 

_stop_

“If you go back to New York your hands will still be broken. You’ll still be dying – you’ll be pushed back months. Years. Loki isn’t going to wait – you have the advantage now, while that other you is distracting him – you can fix it, you just have to change the coordinates – ”

_quarantine memview.exe_

Warning: System critical operations may be affected

_ignore_

Initiating quarantine.  
      Files quarantined: 192  
       Files quarantined: 738914  
       Files quarantined: 59192413

He hadn’t died. He _had not died_ –

“Speaking of which, it should have been noted on your papers anyway. Have you never read them? Where is your passport?”

Ah, crap.

 

 

 

“Get off the road,” Steve ordered tersely.

He was out of breath. He’d insisted on scouting ahead – it meant he wasn’t going to risk breaking Tripitaka’s jaw on his fist... a desire that was starting to scare him with its intensity. Him scouting ahead had also more than halved their speed. Hopefully, that meant that once Steve sorted Tripitaka out, they’d be able to reunite with Tony easily.

If Tony was still around. He was out of comm. range. He’d just... taken off.

After killing two innocent women.

 “We cannot avoid everyone for the rest of our journey,” protested Tripitaka, but since Yulong was siding with Steve this time and had already turned for the edge of the road, he didn’t have that much choice in the matter. Unless he pulled his trump card. The threat of that was like an axe hanging over Steve’s head – no, not Steve’s. Tony’s.

God, where was Tony? Steve had been sure he’d get back into contact as soon as he could, sneak into radio range while Tripitaka was asleep or something – but it had been over a week, and Steve had heard _nothing_. Seen nothing. A week in which they’d leapt off the road at the slightest sign of there being anyone else on it, in which they’d detoured around towns and avoided farms like they were plague-ridden. A week in which Steve had barely slept, and when he did doze off, he found himself dreaming of all the cold, calculatingly cruel ways that he could break Tripitaka to his will, if only he weren’t such a _coward_. And waking – those moments of waking were the worst of all, when he was caught between horror at his sleeping mind, and doubt...

“Tony was mad,” Tripitaka sulked. “If we avoid everyone else, we shall run out of food and starve without ever reaching Maklu.”

“If something out there drove Tony crazy, then we have to avoid it.”

“It’s long behind us.” There was a mulish set to Tripitaka’s mouth. Steve didn’t like it. It spoke of finite impatience – and a budding will to start issuing orders instead of obeying them.

Lord, he hated power games like this. He wished, desperately, for Natasha – for her expertise and her utter practicality in using it. Every night Steve tried to convince Tripitaka to go back, and every night Tripitaka just _ignored_ him. Natasha would have known how to come at the issue sideways; Steve’s efforts to do so were all fumbling, pathetic things that left his argument dead before he could even start it.

They were across several farmers’ fields, well out of shouting range, when the people Steve had spotted up-ahead came around the bend in the road. They were travelling in two loose groups, on foot – of course, Tony had said that was the way that the road worked – with all adults in the first group, ten of them, and another fourteen mixed adults and children behind. There were two large carts drawn by some six-legged horses that looked about as impressive as donkeys next to Yulong.

“Hardly much of a threat,” Tripitaka said disapprovingly.

“Yeah, well,” Steve muttered, feeling exhaustion creep into his voice. The group was obviously travelling like that for safety – a pity they couldn’t do the same, hook up with some people heading in the same direction. The idea of being able to sleep soundly at night, knowing he had somebody whom he trusted to watch his back, was an enticing fantasy. If he –

A shout caught his attention; there was a woman standing on the road, carrying a basket, and one of the travellers had called a greeting to her – she’d come from the same direction as Steve, Tripitaka, and Yulong. Normal human sight wouldn’t have been able to distinguish her features enough to recognize her at this distance, but Steve’s sight wasn’t normal. Normal human ears would not have been able to make out her reply either, but the words sounded clearly to him over the distance:

_“I am Jun, and my village is not far beyond. Would you like me to walk back with you and introduce you?”_

“Stay here,” Steve ordered, and set off at a sprint.

The villagers had started walking toward Jun again; a moment later, the sound of their reply reached them, slower than the sight had: _“We’d be glad to have someone else introduce us. The road has been friendly, but one can never be too careful.”_

“ _STOP!_ ” Steve screamed at them – but he was too far away. The soft dirt was slippery, terrible for running in – quicksand would have been better – and then he managed to hit a place where somebody must have walked before, or been less diligent about keeping the soil so damn aerated, because his feet stopped digging in quite so much and he could _run_. It was too close - “ _STOP!_ ”

The first bunch of travellers looked up at the oddly-dressed crazy man running across a field toward them, and collectively stepped forward, spreading out to shield the second group – and including Jun within that. They held staves in their hands, but if the earlier weapons he’d faced were any indication, those could be hiding some seriously advanced technology. “STOP! Don’t let her get behind you!”

“Back off!” one of the men yelled back, clutching his staff and sliding his feet out into a combat stance – two of his fellows were doing the same, but it was clear that the rest of them had never had any sort of combat training. “We’ll defend ourselves!”

Steve hit the ditch at the edge of the road with his front foot perfectly planted and _leapt,_ his momentum carrying him forward and his jump carrying him up, over the heads of the astounded travellers – they didn’t even try to take a swing at him. He was already re-balanced when he hit the ground, and didn’t even stumble – just raised his shield and asked, voice hard, “Who are you, really?”

He’d thought Tony had been going crazy, because of her. Tripitaka had _tortured_ Tony, because of her.

“Finally,” Jun breathed, and her jaw split open, unhinging somewhere behind her ear; rents in her cheeks revealed more teeth, far more teeth than any human should have. The people around them disappeared; long wiggling masses of flesh grew in their place, and each had a mouth similar to Jun’s, and more _teeth_ – those were the tentacles Tony had mentioned, Steve realized: thinner ropes of flesh linked back the bulbous ends to Jun, and there was something beneath her basket – something – he couldn’t –

_Don’t look don’t look don’t look_

And then it was too late; the tentacles were all lunging for him, and he tried to move but he was too slow.

 

 

 

 _“Ow, Jesus,”_ Tony complained as the androgynous monk that had shown him in now showed him _out_ with a very firm grip on his arm. Given the armour, there wasn’t any actual pain involved – not as –

_a human being_

\- somebody without the extremis enhancements would classify it; and even if there had been then the painblocker patch could have taken care of it. But pain was the general human indicator of damage or potential damage, and Tony didn’t need it to tell when the monk’s grip was strong enough to cause the armour actual strain. Shit, what did they feed these people out here?

“Not only are you a criminal, you are a very stupid one,” said the monk darkly, ignoring his complaints.

Not that he was _complaining_ very hard, either – if Tony had wanted to he could have broken the grip and backhanded the monk into a wall, busted out of the fortress with a few well-placed munitions (or brought down the entire thing) – but what might happen after that wasn’t so clear, and he was trying to avoid active hostility. The monks were content to, as the pig-snake had said, “Send you packing off home until you learn a damned lesson, and your creator along with you,” and he actually did prefer that over the idea of trying to fight his way past a dozen dragons.

He was getting cautious in his old age, look at that.

 _“At least tell me about the demons while you’re throwing me out,”_ he bargained. _“My friend’s in trouble – I think there’s one stalking him along the road. And not in the mountains, either – we were out of them when it first showed up.”_

The monk frowned, and said stiffly. “We send out parties every year to hunt those demons that slip past our nets. Often there are none, but we are not always so fortunate.”

 _“Great, I’m sure that will be a comfort to him when it’s snacking on his bones,”_ Tony said sarcastically, although knowing Steve it actually _would_ be a comfort to him, that somebody would come along and stop it from killing more people. Still didn’t solve the problem of how to keep _Steve_ alive, though. _“How do you kill it? I shot the thing point-blank and it just went poof, then showed up less than an hour later.”_

“There is a ritual. If you were a sage, you would know this. As you are a construct, you’ve not the ability to destroy a demon in any case. Your friend’s best chance would be to stay off the road, which it cannot leave of its own will – we shall destroy it soon, and then both you and he can return to your homelands to secure the _proper_ paperwork and cease trespassing everywhere.”

They’d reached the doorway out into the courtyard; the monk shoved him through it, following and closing the door firmly. “Go.” There was a little shooing motion to accompany the order.

Tony dissolved the faceplate. “Please,” he said seriously, adjusting his body language to the right combination of proud, competent, and begging-for-help – not possible in the old suit, and not a pose that he had a lot of practice at to begin with, but subroutines made everything easier, made muscle memory from half-forgotten drunken episodes. “Tell me what this ritual is – I can tell my friend, and he can do it. He’s got a hell of a lot of soul to be working with.”

The monk eyed him, waiting; Tony held his expression, and at last, the monk gave in with a grumble. “It will get you back to your lands and make you stop breaking such laws much sooner, I suppose. _If_ your friend can complete it. The demons that break loose are those most bound to the road – they are the ones who can travel upon it the easiest. To destroy it, it must first be lured away from the road, and then three koans must be spoken at it; and after that, it is a matter of will, and whether your friend has enough.”

“Great,” Tony said encouragingly. “What’s a koan?”

The monk threw up their hands in disgust. “You are beyond all help,” he/she declared, and went back inside, slamming the door shut and leaving Tony standing out in the icy courtyard, alone.

External temperature: 273

Tripitaka would have to know what a koan was, right? But that would mean he’d have to get back within range of Tripitaka – or, no; he could get Steve to ask Tripitaka. Though given the dimensional distortions, getting close enough just to use the comm. would probably require using the cloak to stay hidden.

He’d reconfigured the nanobots for some solar-energy-capture, but that was... really just a drop in the bucket, compared to what it took to run the suit’s full functions – nevermind the ICG. He’d mostly done it so that if something happened, the protocol would already be in place to start generating backup energy – extremis wouldn’t have to shut down entirely.

The cloak wouldn’t last long enough; and he couldn’t afford to use it like that...

If Tripitaka caught him, he’d – well, he hadn’t specified what he’d do if Tony just _came back_ , exactly, but it was bound to be painful. Emotional warnings popped up, and he shut them down – his mouth was dry, his palms clammy, and – shit, _stop_ \- stop wasn’t working, not like it should be. Too much of this was in his base code, what the hell. Why had he programmed fear, any fear but especially _this_ fear, into his base code? He must’ve been out of his goddamned mind – oh, wait, _he had been_.

Ignore that. He had to do something – that thing was going to kill Steve if he didn’t. And probably Tripitaka, which would also be... pain.

_i have to go back. i_ have _to go back_

One path, probable pain – the other path, certain. There really was no choice here.

 “Time to roll the dice,” he muttered, and with a thought the faceplate closed around him, and he was in the air.

 

 

 

Pain lit up Steve’s right shoulder as a jawful of teeth bit through his suit; he tried to punch the tentacle-head that had bitten him in the mouth with his left hand, but another mouth got in the way, and he had to jam the shield into it instead. It bit down and half its teeth promptly shattered. The entire creature let go with a dozen roars of pain, letting him duck into a backward roll – and possibly leaving a couple of teeth broken off inside his shoulder, he wasn’t sure. It felt like there were shards of shattered glass in there, but he couldn’t tell if that was because there _were_ or if that was normal for having an arm nearly bitten clean off.

The pain brightened his focus, though, pulled him from being locked into looking at its main body. More heads came down but Steve was ready for them now: he ducked beneath gaping, slavering jaws and slammed his shield into one, breaking more teeth; they fell to the road with a sound like chimes. He had to get out – but the thing was all around him, closing in. His right arm hung uselessly at his side and his shoulder throbbed with every movement.

Movement at the edge of his vision – Yulong. Yulong, riderless, which meant that Tripitaka was out there somewhere, undefended – _damn it_. Steve bashed in a few more tentacles, bringing his shield down to half-sever one, and Yulong made a leap twice the distance of what Steve had managed, landing behind the creature, and changed.

If there’d been any doubt in Steve’s mind that Yulong was the river dragon that they’d seen before, there was none now – he became twice the size of the horse he had been, then more; the strap beneath his stomach keeping the saddle on burst and all their gear went flying off. His legs vanished into his body as his scales and fins reappeared, his head growing huge and enormous; he struck down and bit off a tentacle, then spat it out into the ditch.

“You’re a long way from home, river-dragon,” snarled a half-dozen of the mouths – and damn, that was true. Steve had taken advantage of the distraction to bash a few more tentacles, but for every one he severed or pulped, there seemed to be another taking its place – was it multiplying, like a hydra? No – there didn’t seem to be more of them than there had been in the beginning, thank God. But there weren’t any less, either, and it was painfully obvious from Yulong’s awkward gyrations that he really wasn’t built for being on land. He was already bloodied in a half-dozen places.

 _“Well hey, something to be said for gambling,”_ said a blessedly familiar voice in Steve’s ear, and then Tony was there, on the road behind Yulong, and launching himself into the air.

“We need to hit its body – it’s just regrowing these tentacles,” Steve panted, a much more urgent concern than saying _Oh thank God_ , no matter his personal feelings. “Drop down on it – I can’t get near it – ” and neither could Yulong, by the looks of it; but now they could come at it from three directions.

 _“On it,”_ Tony said, dropping down out of the sky and right next to its body. But he didn’t hit it with the repulsors – fair enough; he’d tried that before – instead, wrapping both his arms around it and taking off, pulling it into the air with him and off of the road. All of the mouths screamed as one, turning back on him – _“Ow Jesus fuck what is it with these people and stupid sharp ow – ”_ repulsors shot off several heads and Tony dropped the thing into the fields... about halfway to Tripitaka.

“Tony, get Tripitaka out of there!” Tony was at least between Tripitaka and the monster, now, but that wasn’t necessarily any better if Tripitaka panicked.

 _“Better idea, you get over here – keep it off the road,”_ Tony said, and then switched to speakers to add, _“Tripitaka, to destroy this thing Steve needs to say three koans.”_

Steve couldn’t hear Tripitaka’s answer over the blood pounding in his ears – and throbbing through his injured shoulder – but he vaulted the ditch and ran toward it. “What the hell’s a koan?”

 _“‘_ _Every time Baizhang, Zen Master Dahui, gave a dharma talk, a certain old man would come to listen,’”_ said Tony, evidently repeating Tripitaka. _“‘He usually left after the talk, but one day he – ’ Jesus, isn’t there a shorter one?”_

The monster came boiling back toward the road, tentacles snapping and waving; Tony shot up overhead and lopped most of them off in one shot with a beam from his wrist-lasers. It flinched back, screaming – still screaming – with the same number of mouths, too. Steve hadn’t managed to see them regrow, yet it still had the same number – and there weren’t any tentacles lying on the ground, either. What _was_ this thing?

“Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” Tripitaka shouted.

 _“You have got to be kidding me,”_ Tony said flatly. _“Steve, say it.”_

“Two hands clap – ” Steve dove out of the way as three mouths turned toward him, though they were almost immediately cut off by another laser beam – “and there’s a sound. What’s the sound of one hand? Tony – ” he ducked and rolled again – “I don’t think this is working – ”

 _“Two more,”_ Tony urged.

If koans were just supposed to be stupid questions – “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Steve backed off, then realized he was backing toward the road, and threw himself to the side instead.

“I hadn’t heard that one before,” called Tripitaka, sounding far too philosophical about the whole thing. “Ah – if you meet the Buddha, kill him.”

 _What?_ No time to wonder about what these koans were supposed to be – Steve barely got his leg out of the way of one snapping jaw (Tony’s laser sliced the head off the moment he was clear), and shouted, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him!”

“You have no true wisdom!” the monster’s central body snarled at him – one mouth only – and an arm, an actual arm, not a tentacle, was lifting the lid of the basket –

_“Steve, move!”_

But he couldn’t. What was inside – he could not –

A hand grabbed him by his uninjured shoulder and pulled him into the air, spinning him around and breaking his line of sight; Steve gasped for breath, finding his lungs starving for air. _“Steve, focus,”_ Tony told him urgently, dipping low to cut off the monster’s retreat toward the road with a barrage of repulsors all firing at once – _“You have to will it destroyed. Come on, Greatest Generation, this should be_ easy _for you – ”_

They dropped back down and Steve was suddenly looking straight at it. He squeezed his eyes shut – he couldn’t get caught by it again. _Go,_ he thought, and _die_ – but that wasn’t right, that wasn’t what Tony had said, and Tony seemed to have figured out what this thing was even if his proposed method of defeating it was ridiculous – _die, drop dead, you’re NOTHING_ –

 _You are my prey,_ something said, but it wasn’t aloud – it was in his head. All at once he could feel the mouths snapping at him, but not at flesh, they were going to eat him – him, and Tripitaka, and then Tony would be –

He raised his shield above him and felt it grow in weight and size, impossibly so – but he wasn’t complaining. The added weight gave it more force when he slammed it down into the soil, an impenetrable wall between him and the monster. It would not have him, and he _would_ not leave Tony to Tripitaka’s revenge. The monster’s heads collided with the shield, and some tried to bite into it – losing teeth as heads before them had – but none so much as attempted to pass around it.

That still left the problem of how he was going to get at _it_ , though. Steve vaulted to the top of his shield without the faintest amount of effort, although his shield had now grown to the size of a mountain, itself. The monster, very far below him, looked quite small. He hurtled himself at it without concern for the distance between them – and bounced off of something smooth, like a curved dome made of glass. The impact made his head throb, and for a moment he opened his eyes and saw the farmer’s field before him. Tony was hovering just in front and before him, slicing away convulsing tentacle-necks with his blue laser beams, protecting Tripitaka’s huddled form across the field. Steve’s shield was normal-sized, still in his own hands.

 _“Heathen!”_ snarled the mouths triumphantly, and the writhing necks bunched up and charged straight for him – for Tony, in front of him.

 _No,_ Steve thought, and shut his eyes. Some part of him was aware of Tony grabbing him again, lifting him into short flight – but he had to trust that Tony would protect his body while he tried to end this thing. In his mind’s eye the mountain of his shield appeared again, and the glass dome of the monster’s own protections – he beat at them with his fists, but it was no good. He’d need to uproot his shield to attack the thing properly, and as soon as he did that it would be on him. But then how?

“Oh!” said Tripitaka, sounding at once very near – he was standing right beside Steve – and very far: he was lying in the dirt half a field away. Tony had dropped them down again. “ _Now_ I understand. It cannot withstand enlightenment. This is the first question I posed to my master: Does a dog have a Buddha nature or not?”

The mind-beast writhed and howled, _“No!”_ to which Tripitaka nodded – and it shrank back, beneath its screaming rage. The monster’s glass shield – curiously visible, now that Steve knew to expect it – had gone all gummy, like taffy left out in the sun.

But even if Tripitaka understood what sort of magic might be needed to deal with the thing, it was clear that he lacked the willpower to do it properly. He needed help. Tony had been sure it could be Steve, sure it could be a matter of will – in this place where will was his shield, as tall as a mountain...

 _Oh_ , thought Steve, feeling a bit stupid. He tipped his shield over. It fell with a thunderous booming noise, broken slightly by the sound of the shield being thoroughly squished beneath its weight.

Steve opened his eyes. The monster was collapsing – fading, the horrible basket already gone, and the rest of it turning to sludge and quickly disappearing. Only the teeth remained, lying in little piles over the field. Steve nearly staggered with relief – would have, except that Tony was still holding him up with one hand maglocked to Steve’s suit.

 _“Go team,”_ said Tony, sounding smugly satisfied, and Steve huffed out a laugh, letting Tony take his weight. _“Shit. You okay? I thought it missed everything vital.”_

Of course Tony would have scans to tell him that. “It did,” Steve grunted, looking down at his shoulder. There would have been a _lot_ more blood if one of the teeth had managed to sever an artery – the serum took care of small arterial nicks really damn fast, like it somehow knew that they were life-threatening. “Just adrenaline crash.” He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. With the adrenaline fading rapidly, the pain was actually starting to register.

 _“Sit down,”_ Tony said, lowering him down so that Steve didn’t have much of a choice, and he ended up half-leaning against Tony’s leg. _“Sorry, I wish I had painkillers.”_

“I’ve had worse,” Steve said, but he had to grit his teeth to swallow down a hiss of pain at the movement. “You okay?” Those teeth had gone through the armour, too, although it was already repairing itself – could Tony repair his own flesh as easily?

_“I’m fine. Tripitaka, don’t – uh – just don’t...”_

Steve forced his eyes open – he hadn’t realized he’d closed them. Well. After the week he’d had, he was more than a little tired.

“I told you not to come back,” Tripitaka said. Despite the fact that Tony had saved their asses, he actually sounded _angry_ , a complete one-eighty from how he’d sounded just a moment earlier in that... mindscape... place. “You slew two innocent women, and as punishment have been – ”

“Wait,” Steve said, hauling himself to his feet using Tony as a support. His injured shoulder throbbed like the teeth were still stuck in there. “Wait, Tripitaka, he wasn’t crazy. That monster was a shape-shifter.”

“What?”

 _“Genuine demon,”_ said Tony. _“Hunts things along the road.”_

Tripitaka wouldn’t have been able to hear its introduction to... well, itself, since the travellers had all been bits of it. Steve hurried the explanation. “The monster – it took the form of the same woman we met, just now – that’s why I went running back to the road. I saw it was the same woman. It must’ve been the other one, too, if Tony could see it all along.”

Tripitaka glanced between them, and then behind them – Steve looked back as well, and saw Yulong, returned to horse form, plodding wearily over to them. He didn’t look good, either – dozens of small, bloody bites covered him, standing out in stark contrast to his white hide.

 _“I found a monastery back in the mountains that explained it,”_ Tony shrugged, shifting Steve’s weight against him. _“Steve, sit back down before you fall down.”_

“I owe you an apology then,” Tripitaka said gravely. “In my role of teacher, I have failed my student.” He looked troubled, and he cast his gaze down to the ground instead of meeting their eyes. “The dog is a bag of flesh, because it knowingly offends,” he said to himself very quietly.

_“Uh-huh. How about this – you don’t use the headband against me again, and we’ll call it square.”_

Tripitaka frowned. “I will consider it.”

The Iron Man armour was unmoving against Steve, but Tony didn’t say anything further, and Steve grit his teeth as he let himself sit down again. Tripitaka would ‘consider it’? Back when they’d met him, he’d said he _wouldn’t_ , except to make them take him with them – they were losing ground.

“I’m glad you came back,” Steve said, looking up at Tony.

_“Oh, ye of little faith. I wasn’t gone that long.”_

Steve frowned. Their timelines hadn’t matched up? Tony had said he could compensate for that – “It was a week.”

_“...huh.”_

“I thought you could calculate the time difference.”

 _“Wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong,”_ said Tony shortly. _“Stay here, I’ll get the stuff Boxer dropped.”_

“Tony.” Steve grabbed his shin before he could fly off. “I’m sorry.”

 _“Something was mind-whammying_ one _of us, you made a judgement call.”_

That wasn’t what he was apologizing for. Well, it was – he’d made a judgement call, and though the evidence he’d had at the time had been all he’d had to work at... he hadn’t been good enough to figure out anything _more_ from that evidence.

But mostly, he hadn’t been able to protect Tony. He hadn’t been able to talk Tripitaka around in a week.

 _“Steve. It’s fine.”_ Tony’s voice was almost gentle, but he moved his leg out of Steve’s grip – and it was either let go or let Tony drag him into falling over. Steve let go. _“Stay here. I’ll be back in a minute – I’ll even_ walk, _no time differentials need get involved.”_

“Alright,” Steve said, and watched him go.


	5. The Imposter King

_“Aha!”_ Tony exclaimed, about a week and a half later. _“Got it.”_ He sounded triumphant, although of course, Steve couldn’t read his expression – not with the faceplate down, and in the last nine days, Tony hadn’t raised it once. Steve was starting to get concerned – well, that was a lie. He had _started_ to be concerned eight days ago.

“Got what?”

 _“Got how the demon targeted the illusions specifically at you. I think. Can you see this?”_ He held out his hand, palm repulsor up.

“Your gauntlet?”

There was a pause. _“...no. Damn it.”_

Steve shook his head. “Sorry.” He sighed. “You’ll have time to work on it tonight – I want to stop early.”

_“We’ve still got supplies.”_

“Yeah, and I’d like to make use of them. We all smell, and I’m exhausted.”

And he was pretty sure that Tony, despite needing sleep now – for reasons still unknown – had not _actually_ slept at all in the past eleven days. But it was impossible for Steve to be completely sure, because Tony hadn’t been willing to lift the damn faceplate once, not since he’d gotten back from wherever he’d gone when Tripitaka had sent him away. He was becoming more than a bit erratic over the comm., chattering away with the occasional non-sequiturs that left Steve scrambling to catch up – and concerned that somehow Tripitaka had done something to Tony with koans, even though the idea was ridiculous. Tony was not some sort of monstrous creature that could be defeated by spouting nonsense rhymes – or maybe he could, if it was a spell... but there had to be power behind it, and Tripitaka had proven he _didn’t_ have that type of willpower.

“Enlightenment can only come to the willing,” Tripitaka had said sadly, when Steve had asked him about koans – about koans, but not about Tony. _Still_...

Tony hadn’t even been willing to let Steve check his injuries – for all that he’d fussed over Steve’s – instead insisting that extremis would repair them quicker if he remained completely encased within the armour. It had rung true at the time – but like a hollow truth, no matter that the armour had looked as good as new within a day. It might not have been a falsehood, but it hadn’t been the real reason Tony wouldn’t take the armour off.

Steve had been trying to give him space, but that didn’t seem to be working.

 _“Speak for yourself, I’m a rose,”_ Tony said smugly. _“‘If you meet the Buddha, kill him.’”_

“What?”

_“The koan. That one doesn’t fit. Tree falls in a forest, sound of one hand clapping – murder of a major religious figure? Doesn’t follow.”_

“Point,” Steve agreed, and kept himself from suggesting the logical course of action, which would to ask Tripitaka. It wasn’t like Steve wanted to talk to Tripitaka, either.

 _“So what’s its meaning? Why does it damage a demon? It talked about... wisdom, and spiritual power, so these are things... but how the words fit in...”_ Tony wasn’t really talking to him anymore, Steve recognized; he was just talking aloud. Well, though the comm., so it was even odds whether he was actually talking aloud or just transmitting the radio signals, but it came out to the same thing. _“Hmm.”_

“Is there anything I can say to convince you to stop thinking about this?” Steve asked wearily.

 _“If you’ve got your shield, I’ve got armour,”_ Tony said. He sounded almost smug – almost. Maybe it was the comm., maybe it was the lack of sleep, but there was something... not quite right, still. _“And a labyrinth, if I can build one – knowledge_ is _the best defence, Captain Ostrich.”_

That was unfair. Steve let it go.

He didn’t say anything more for the next hour and a half, at which point they crested a rise and found themselves looking down on a large complex below – fields of crops laid out not around farmhouses, but a central stone building set about a half-mile away from the road.

“Oh, luck!” cried Tripitaka. “Here they will certainly take us in for the night.”

“You sure?” asked Steve, glancing at him. They hadn’t exactly met many friendly people yet, although after their first two disastrous stops in a town, they’d at least been able to buy supplies at the third one.

“Yes, it is a friendly temple,” Tripitaka said with confidence, so they kept on, and when they came to the track leading away from the white road, they turned off on it.

 _“Ten bucks says they throw us out in half an hour,”_ predicted Tony, as Tripitaka bowed to the elderly lady monk who came out to greet them. She reminded Steve quite firmly of one of the nuns at the orphanage – a woman who didn’t have much time for nonsense, but had infinite patience for the garden. Since the monk’s robes were quite covered in dirt and she was holding a spade which she kept drumming her fingers on impatiently, Steve rather thought that they’d probably have gotten along like a house on fire.

“Of course you are quite welcome to stay the night,” she said, when Tripitaka had finished the introductions. “Come. I will show you to the guest cells where you may deposit your things, and meditate until dinner.”

_“...make that two minutes.”_

“They’re religious, it’s not like a prison cell,” Steve muttered under his breath, smiling at the monk politely when she glanced at him.

_“Uh-huh. Gonna take the original bet, then?”_

“No deal.”

He should have, though, Steve thought later, after polishing off dinner – it hadn’t exactly been a large meal, even for a guy without a metabolism four times normal. But they had more food back with their gear – he could eat more later. He ended up stealing Tony’s plate anyway.

“Are you sure you don’t need to eat?” he murmured under his breath. Tripitaka was regaling the monastery of the trials he’d faced – with a surprising amount of humility – but it seemed like so-called ‘students’ were supposed to keep their mouths shut.

_“Curse.”_

“Sleeping.”

_“Extremis.”_

Steve grimaced. “Just... maybe you should try it.”

Tony’s voice conveyed perfectly well that if Steve had been able to see his face, he’d see that Tony was wrinkling his nose. _“I’ll pass. Not a big fan of rice and beans.”_

“I think you’d like the spices.”

 _“I’m wearing – I_ am _– some of the most advanced sensors on the planet, Steve. There are no spices in that.”_

“Shucks, I forgot. Given how little you wear the armour, and all.”

 _“We aren’t having this conversation here,”_ said Tony. Steve grimaced. They weren’t in private – Tony had a point. He cleaned Tony’s plate, and waited for some sign that dinner was dismissed – no point in being a rude guest, since they _hadn’t_ been thrown out yet.

But since Tripitaka had his own, separate cell, and Yulong was off in the stables – perhaps a bit demeaning, but the monastery interior wasn’t built to accommodate a six-legged horse – after dinner, they _did_ have some privacy.

“So sue me, I haven’t seen your face nearly three weeks – come on, Tony.”

 _“What,”_ Tony folded his arms across his chest – a move that the armour more menacing than it should have been – “ _Getting worried that maybe I’m not the same guy who flew off?”_

Steve blinked, and ruthlessly squashed the instinct to raise his shield. That wasn’t –

He hadn’t seen Tony’s face in nearly three weeks. He hadn’t seen Tony since he’d left. They’d been confronted by a shapeshifter using illusions, and he hadn’t checked – well, okay, not that it would have made a difference if he had looked – the demon had used _illusions_. But Steve had bantered with Tony and Tony had bantered back, and maybe he’d been a bit high-strung, but he was definitely Tony. Steve relaxed. “Stop trying to distract me and just take off the damn helmet, Tony.”

Tony tilted his head to the side. In a gentler voice, Steve added, “You tell me – is there anyone spying on us right now?”

 _“...no,”_ Tony admitted reluctantly. _“Steve... I...”_

Tentatively, Steve reached out to grab his shoulders. “Tony. Please.”

It felt strangely like Tony was teetering on the brink of a cliff – as though here were some chance that, if missed, would not come again. Only superstition, probably. But if Tony spent the rest of his life refusing to face the world except through the filtered light of a HUD, Steve knew, deep down, that he’d never forgive himself.

_I should have stopped Tripitaka. I should have found a way._

“...okay,” said Tony, and it came out half through the comm. and half through his lips as the faceplate melted away – only the faceplate, not the entire helmet, but it was more than enough to show that even if he _needed_ sleep, Tony clearly hadn’t been letting himself get any. Steve had been taking his own share of watches, but if the enormous bags under his bloodshot eyes were any indication, Tony hadn’t been sleeping during the break. Unwilling to try, or unable?

Tony frowned at him. “I don’t look that bad.”

“Yes, you do,” said Steve dryly, and picked up one of the thin blankets the cell had contained, shoving it at Tony’s chest. “Go to sleep, Tony.” And when Tony’s eyes slid to the side, “I’ll keep watch.”

“You’re a little big for a teddy bear,” Tony murmured, but he seemed to be suddenly amenable to the idea; he balled up the blanket for a pillow, curling up in a corner.

“I’ve been to Coney Island, Tony, I know _that’s_ not true.” Not that he’d ever have been able to win one of those giant prizes when he was a kid – and now, it wasn’t really fair to the carnies for him to try.

“You’re the underdog in this fight, Steve.” Tony’s half-asleep, almost sing-song tone made the words not register for a moment. “He’ll take you apart.”

That... didn’t sound like Tony was talking about Tripitaka.

“Can’t say no forever,” Steve breathed, the words rising with the memory.

“Sure you can,” mumbled Tony. “Just forget to increment your while loop. Shitty programming, damnit Maya...”

His breathing had evened out. Steve felt his eyebrows raising as he glanced over at Tony – that had been fast. He shifted his shield on his arm and settled in for a long night – Tony _really_ needed to catch up on sleep.

Predictably, less than an hour later somebody was banging on their cell door.

 

 

 

“It was a _dream_ ,” said Steve, feeling more irritated than if he’d been the one woken out of a sound sleep.

“I cannot just dismiss it!” said Tripitaka, wringing his hands. “I must know if it’s true. You’ll have to go see if his body is there.” 

“We can deal with it in the morning!”

 _“If we’re going to be going grave-robbing, we should probably be doing it while it’s dark out,”_ Tony put in, a private message for Steve’s ear only.

Tripitaka’s story, such as it was, went like this: he had just fallen asleep – had in fact thought he was still awake – when a ghost had risen up through the floor of his cell. Upon being questioned, the ghost had said, “I am the rightful ruler of this kingdom, but my throne and my form has been stolen by an evil sorcerer, who played at being my friend until he could kill me and hide my body away at the bottom of my royal garden. In the three years since my wife has begun to suspect, but the imposter keeps her locked away and does not often see my son, and so my son does not know; and I fear greatly for them both. Please, will you help me?” At which point, Tripitaka had agreed, and then had woken up.

Except, unlike any normal person who woke up out of a weird but harmless dream, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, he’d immediately gotten up and started banging on Steve and Tony’s door.

“What exactly are we supposed to do?” Steve asked, folding his arms across his chest. “Assume we find proof. We expose the sorcerer – and what? Kick-start a revolution? We could rescue his wife and son, take them with us, but I’m not going to help topple a government without knowing that the people stepping in to run it instead are going to do a good job. But we _don’t_ have time to stick around and ensure it.”

 _“I’m putting that up on Youtube when we get home,”_ said Tony _sotto voice_.

“Obviously, the rightful king must be restored to the throne,” said Tripitaka. “He is the one who has Heaven’s mandate. And if he is a poor ruler, then Heaven shall make that clear soon enough.”

Steve stared at Tripitaka, taking a moment to try to put his thoughts into some sort of order.

 _“Uh. Laying aside everything wrong with your last two sentences, we’re not sticking a zombie on a throne. We have enough problems with that back on Earth,”_ Tony spoke up at last – spoke up _aloud_ , that was. The Iron Man voice sounded even more robotic than normal.

“I am no Great Sage Equal to Heaven, but I am most likely equal to the task of retrieving a wrongly-slain, restless soul from the afterlife, especially one that already has such strength of will as to appear in the mortal world as a ghost. You shall have to dig up the body and bring it back, so that I may try. Even if I am not equal to the task, a full-hearted attempt is an utmost necessity – I gave my word that I would help him and to break it would be a disaster. And as you are my disciples, you are therefore bound as well.” Tripitaka planted his hands on his hips and looked at them both sternly.

Steve crossed his own arms, resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose, in hopes it might impede the ghost-headache he was experiencing. He needed time to think – without Tripitaka standing there holding a sword over Tony’s head, and all-too-willing to use it. Even though Tripitaka hadn’t so much as glanced meaningfully at the headband that Tony still wore, its presence felt like a heavy weight in the room. Hell, getting away from Tripitaka had been one reason that Steve had been so happy to discover that the monastery intended to give the ‘master’ his own cell, and let the ‘disciples’ share.

He didn’t have time to think now. But something like a mission, out from under Tripitaka’s eyes – because they weren’t taking him along on anything that required stealth, not when he could wait here in safety – it would at least be time away from that awful collar.

“Okay,” Steve gave in. “Where’s this garden that he’s likely to be buried in?”

Tripitaka hemmed and hawed. “I’m not sure. But if it is his royal garden, then it must be in a palace; and very likely in the capital of this kingdom. We must ask the monks here for a map.”

It wasn’t been that long since the evening meal; most of the monks, it turned out, were still awake – or were willing to wake up in order to learn what their guests were so excited about. There was a great deal of nodding and satisfied muttering as Tripitaka explained the situation – “The whole kingdom has had bad luck for these last three years,” said one elderly monk. “I’d never seen the like of it before. Of course this would explain it.”

 _“If we toss somebody_ off _the throne, leaving no replacement isn’t any more responsible than backing somebody we’re not sure of,”_ Tony said quietly in Steve’s ear.

“All our options suck. I’m aware,” Steve said dryly, almost soundlessly, relying on Tony’s mics to pick up his words.

_“These people seem to want the old king back. If the rest of the kingdom’s the same, it’s not a bad choice.”_

“I’m not saying it is, I’m saying we don’t know. Can’t know. This is one monastery.”

 _“...okay, that was a bit oblique. What I mean is – it might not_ be _a choice. It might be written into the rules of this place – the throne always returns to the rightful king. By blood, and no, you don’t need to do that lecture, I know you think primogeniture is so 1775.”_

“Are you just playing Devil’s Advocate for the hell of it?” Steve griped.

In due time, they were presented with a map. Only a small corner of the kingdom was anywhere near the road – to get to the capital, they’d need to travel far overland. Steve glanced at Tony, trying to get an assessment of how viable it was to venture off-road, but the armour’s blank face was, well, blank. Even though Tony could probably have made it wear expressions – he could reform it at will, after all.

That mildly distracting thought lasted until Tony said, _“Shall we? I don’t know about you, but I’m not really keen to hang around, Cap.”_

“Are you sure you have the time-travel problems worked out?” Steve asked his as they made their way outside, followed by a crowd of curious monks.

 _“No, but we know where we’re going,”_ Tony pointed out. _“And it’s not that far away.”_ That was true – it was decent-sized if horses were the main mode of travel – no matter how many legs they had – but it hardly held a candle to the size of America, or even Germany.

Steve had to admit to himself that he was slightly disappointed. He’d looked forward to flying again.

_Idiot. Like that’s important._

_“...so we can fly pretty close to the ground,”_ Tony finished belatedly, and Steve felt a corner of his mouth lift in an involuntary smile. _“At least until we get near enough to the city that the folding’s not such a problem.”_

Flying close to the ground, weaving in and out among trees, hills, and other obstacles, was a different sort of rush than being a thousand feet up in the air; Steve clung on for dear life, despite the mag-lock, and had to bite down hard on his lower lip to keep from whooping with the joy of it. People would be sleeping by now. Tony was flying slow enough not to throw off too much sound; Steve could keep his damn mouth shut, even if the rush of cold air against his face was a better high than parachuting.

The armour was black beneath his fingertips, and non-reflective; even the light from the repulsors was somehow dimmed. “Smart,” Steve murmured, his words eaten immediately by the rush of wind, although it was less of a change than Tony turning his armour into clothes – and vice versa – so Steve supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by it.

 _“I try,”_ said Tony, the amusement coming through loud and clear.

“Good,” said Steve. “We’re going to need your brain to get out of this one.”

The hesitation came clearly through the armour, although Steve couldn’t have pinpointed any specific clue – but he was plastered up against Tony, and that was enough. _“I wasn’t playing Devil’s Advocate earlier just for kicks. The road’s obviously a construct, but the dimensional folding of normal space... it could be natural law here. Well, I say_ could, _in the way that Los Angeles_ could _be built on a fault zone, hey, maybe that’s why there’re so many earthquakes.”_

“I’m not really getting what wonky space has to do with overthrowing local governments, Tony.”

 _“When the monks say there’s been ‘bad luck’, it might be more than the Earthly consequences for letting a backstabbing creep rule your country. It might_ actually _be something more akin to gravity – force, effect. Lack a ruler from a particular bloodline – crops fail, kids starve, monks rabble-rouse.”_

“Conjecture,” Steve objected, because even for Tony, that was a pretty far leap.

 _“Sure. Everything is, here,”_ Tony replied, so flatly that Steve found himself biting back a reply. _“Look. I told you about where I ended up – those fates that controlled everything? That wasn’t just about time and space, that was about individual destinies.”_

“That doesn’t mean that _this_ place is like that,” Steve said firmly. There were lights up ahead, the dim light of fire seen through cloth screens. The dim light of the stars overhead – there was no moon – made it just possible for Steve to see the city spread out below. It was small, by modern standards, although the palace in the northern quarter was impressive, but –

All the light became more obvious, more brilliant, as Tony cloaked them; Steve made the mistake of glancing upward, and his attention was caught by the stars, transformed from pinpricks of light to glittering diamonds.

 _“It might.”_ Tony was talking again – it was hard to concentrate on his words. _“I told you Maklu was in a weird location – which was an understatement. The math is some of the most fucked up I’ve ever seen. It’s located in our 3D space, yes, but it’s also in everything else’s 3D space, even the stuff that_ isn’t _in ours.”_ There was a sort of awe in Tony’s voice that made Steve almost relax a bit. _“And that’s my point. It’s not a central set of worlds, but it’s in the same space as them. The rules bleeding over seems... uh, likely, considering the way these people go on about order and heavenly will.”_

They slowed, coming in to a hover over top of the palace. There were a large number of gardens stretched out below, all of which seemed well-tended except for one. That one lay behind a closed wall and looked half-dead, half-overgrown: the ornately shaped bushes and small trees of the other gardens had all died off, and the only plants remaining were choking weeds and creeping vines draped over everything.

 _“I’m guessing no dragons here,”_ said Tony, and Steve had to concur – if anybody had been flying over this place, that garden would have been an enormous red flag. Unless it was simply the custom not to question the king around here.

They dropped gently into the centre of it, neither of them bothering to be careful about the placement of their boots – there was no way to stand on the ground here without stepping on some creeping weed. The ICG flickered off, turning the hitherto enchanting stonework into a gruesome spectacle that might belong in an abandoned graveyard. Steve jogged over to the gate at the entrance – it was made of stone, but in a strange way, as if somebody had first tried to board up the original wrought iron gate, and then had turned the entire thing to stone – either that, or it was carved by a sculptor with a very strange sense of art.

 _“Human skeleton, buried nine feet down,”_ Tony said, and Steve turned back to see the black shadow that was the armour indicate an enormous, partially buried stone block. 

So Tripitaka hadn’t just been dreaming. Hopefully the poor guy’s remains weren’t encased _within_ the stone.

“We could always just tell him it’s not here,” Steve said, but it was a stupid suggestion – he didn’t need to hear Tony’s derisive snort to know that. If they did that, what were the odds that the ghost would just show up again? And who would Tripitaka believe? “Alright, fine. We bring him back, let Tripitaka see – but Tony, we can’t just pick and choose these people’s leader for them.”

 _“Youtube,”_ Tony half sang.

“Tony.”

 _“Steve.”_ Tony’s turned his head away. It struck Steve as an entirely _fake_ gesture – given the sensor suite the armour possessed, it didn’t really mean anything. _“I... can’t.”_

Somehow, Steve didn’t think that Tony was talking about the same thing that he was in regards to that ‘can’t’. “What do you mean?”

_“You take a piece of metal and you stress it – it’s never gonna be as strong as it was. I broke once. I’ll break again.”_

“Tony...” Steve stepped forward softly, carefully, to lay a hand on the armour’s shoulder. “You defied him earlier. It was one of the bravest things I’d ever seen.” Not that he’d been appreciating that bravery at the time, thinking as he had that it was an innocent woman Tony was risking his life to kill, but in retrospect, knowing what Tripitaka could _and would_ do... it must have taken a hell of a lot of courage.

_“That was different. The demon would’ve killed him if I didn’t – he’d have taken it out on me, it was the lesser of two evils. We don’t have a plan here, Steve. There is no way that just refusing to do what he wants is going to make him change his mind – not this time.”_

“Then we need a plan,” Steve said firmly. “We’ll – we need to convince him it’s not in his best interests.” Tripitaka had sworn to help the ghost, but he’d also said that if the king was a bad king, he’d lose the mandate of Heaven...

 _“Do we?”_ Tony recoiled and stalked away, around to the other side of the stone block. _“You’re hung up on the idea that we can’t interfere, Cap – too many history lessons getting to you?”_ He knelt, and Steve could hear the metal of his gauntlets scraping against stone as he dug down – and then, with a heave, he flipped it up and over, sending all two-and-a-half by ten by five feet of it flying; Steve had to dodge out of the way.

“I’ve never liked people who trample all over others, Tony.”

_“Yet you’re not willing to get rid of a guy who literally murdered his way into power.”_

“We’ve got one view of a situation – this is different than if we were going to stick around, Tony. We can’t just take on responsibility for them and then abandon them. We don’t know enough.”

Steve watched, reluctant to help, as Tony went over to one of the larger, flatter pieces of ironwork, and chopped it away with his wrist lasers; a minute later, he had a passable shovel, and began clearing dirt from the grave at an almost alarming rate – alarming, considering that it would take them back to Tripitaka that much sooner.

Steve didn’t understand. Why the hell would Tony want to finish any sooner than he had to?

_“You were willing enough to fight wars on foreign soil before.”_

“That was different and you know it.” It took real effort to bite back his frustration. “All we have is the word of one _ghost_.” 

_“Tripitaka has his way, it’ll be one ex-ghost – the people here can compare kings and pick whichever one they like.”_

“And we’ll be – where? You can’t just kick something like this off and run away from it, Tony.”

Tony turned sharply; Steve imagined that if Tony had had the eyes still lit, the helmet would have been glaring at him. _“So I should run away first, ignore the problem entirely? What’s going on, Steve? Since when does_ Captain America _think that_ inaction _is the lesser of two evils?”_

“I don’t know!” Steve gestured sharply at the grave that Tony was digging out. “I don’t know when the hell you started thinking that anything _Tripitaka_ proposes is a good idea!”

Tony was still. Then, _“Jesus Christ, Steve, you could keep your voice down.”_

Steve winced, shoulders slumping. He shouldn’t have gone off at Tony that way – he was making a total hash out of this. Tony had... Stockholm Syndrome, or _something_ – he’d just admitted as much. And... it wasn’t like Steve had been doing anything to help him.

 _“Help me finish this before someone comes and checks who the idiot yelling in the king’s private garden is,”_ Tony said brusquely, tossing the shovel up to Steve. A quick boost of the repulsors carried him out of the pit he’d already dug, and over to the grating to assemble another make-shift shovel. Silently, Steve jumped down, and started shovelling out dirt.

Nobody did come and interrupt them, although they finished in short order anyway, uncovering a thoroughly skeletized corpse of a man, buried directly in soil – all of the flesh had long since rotted away. Steve stared at the arm-bone he’d accidentally knocked aside in dismay – how were they supposed to transport back a _skeleton_? It would fall to pieces.

_“Now the tricky bit.”_

“We’ll need a blanket, or a sheet,” Steve said, grimacing. They were going to have to hope it didn’t matter if the bones got all piled up – there wasn’t any way that they were going to be able to transport it, not lose any of the smaller bones, _and_ keep it all arranged as it should be. It seemed horribly disrespectful to the deceased, though – even if the deceased _had_ asked for it.

 _“Ye of little faith,”_ said Tony. _“You should probably stand back for this.”_

Eyebrows raised, Steve jumped up and out of the pit, then crouched near the edge, watching. Plates on the armour’s forearms unlatched – not melting away as they had when Tony changed the armour with extremis, but actually moving forward as a solid piece of metal: part of some device. Tony plunged his gauntleted fists into the grave-dirt, bringing the edges of the plates just level with it.

There was an enormous noise, like the sound of undoing a zipper magnified to a thunderclap, half-deafening Steve. He clapped his hands over his ears – too late – and almost missed the strange black light that flickered about the armour’s fingers: visible again now, because the bottom of the grave was _gone_. Lacking anything to kneel on, Tony tipped forward, and only a quick application of the repulsors saved him from hitting the side of the grave with his face.

Cautiously, Steve removed his hands from his ears. “What the heck was _that?_ ”

Tony’s voice through his earpiece definitely didn’t help with the ringing. _“Subspace pocket. Only holds so much, though – and this pretty much puts it at capacity.”_

Not that Steve really understood what _that_ was supposed to mean, but – he shook his head, feeling foolish. Of all the things that Tony did or said that might be surprising, upgrades to the armour should not be among them. Although, he had said – “I thought you hadn’t figured out where Bruce’s extra mass comes from.”

_“Because I haven’t. That’s definitely not this type of subspace pocket.”_

There were different types? “Huh. Well, if we’re not gonna be lugging a body around...” and they should still have a few hours left until dawn... “We need intel on this place. Let’s get some.”

Tony tilted his head. _“Fair deal,”_ he agreed, after a moment. _“Though we should probably start at the_ other _side of the palace.”_

Steve snorted, already stepping forward to grab onto the armour, and be grabbed in turn by the maglock. “Yeah. You think you could have made it any louder?” The ringing in his ears was starting to fade, and over it he could hear confused shouts in the distance – private garden or no, they were going to have company shortly.

 _“Oh, honey, you should quit while you’re ahead – unless you_ really _want to know the answer to that question.”_ The repulsors carried them upward, ICG cloaking them as soon as they cleared the garden wall. The palace was filling with lights, although not so quickly as to indicate a general mobilization – but most people would have been startled out of a sound sleep.

“See any secret evil lairs?” Steve asked, peering down at the lights below, trying to ignore their dizzying beauty. He’d just about gotten used to it when Tony shut the ICG off again, leaving them hovering almost-silently above the palace, the boots probably just as dim as the stars from down below.

_“Not so much. Throne room, though. Garden... dojo? Some sort of mini-temple. Treasury – hey, if we get a reward we should visit there, they’ve got some stuff that could be useful. And... aha, sorcerer.”_

Steve glanced back. A tiny figure in voluminous robes was striding toward the gate of the ruined garden, holding – Steve squinted – a small ball of fire, outstretched above one hand. Well, that certainly looked like magic, although it was hard to say if it were any more or less so than a dragon. But the figure raised an arm and the stone gate dissolved, then reformed as the figure entered; and as the person then went directly to the back of the garden where there was now a giant hole in the ground, it seemed safe to say that even if this _wasn’t_ their sorcerer, they were at least a party to murder. For several seconds, the figure stood stock still at the edge of the hole they’d hug, and then promptly went running back out the garden and into the palace.

 _“Run run run,”_ said Tony, almost gleefully. _“Let’s see where you’re going. You and... your guards? Magic not enough?”_ The armour tilted forward, lazily flying over the palace – Steve assumed, following the path the sorcerer was taking inside. _“And... okay, not where I expected you to go.”_

“Where’s he gone?”

 _“Well, unless he’s got a similar view to it as the French did – to confront his loving wife.”_ The repulsors cut out and they dropped down a few hundred feet until they were just above one of the rooftops. _“You’ll want to hear this.”_

Steve listened. “I can’t hear a thing.”

 _“...really,”_ Tony breathed, like somebody had just given him the keys to the kingdom.

Steve glanced at him. Granted, it would be useful if they could start speaking aloud about Loki again without worrying he was hearing everything they were saying, but there were plenty of other methods of muffling sound through a wall – or a roof, in this case. And apparently this wasn’t even good enough to keep Tony from overhearing, so it probably couldn’t be whatever the gods used – right?

He’d point that out later. “Mind patching me in?”

The first few seconds were a rushed, sped-up conversation that Steve was barely able to parse into proper words:

_“My wife, where have you been this night?”_

_“I have been here, my husband.”_

_“It is the middle of the night, and you are not asleep.”_

_“My husband, I was woken by a terrible loud noise a minute ago.”_

_“A minute ago? I think you are lying to me, wife.”_

_“O my husband, my king, I do not lie to you; you may ask any of the guards. I have not left my chambers since I retired here after dinner.”_

_“I know well that you do not need to go anywhere to pull your strings.”_

_“How can I possibly do such things, my husband? You have dismissed my handmaidens; you have kept me from my son; I have not spoken to another soul un-chaperoned in three years.”_ Her voice was subdued, pleading – except for those two words: ‘my husband’. He couldn’t have pinpointed what it was – they sounded so subservient – but they made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

This lady definitely knew something was up.

_“How can I have done otherwise? My beautiful queen, I married you thinking you desired peace as strongly as I. But that was youthful naiveté. You have conspired against me, and now I am forced to admit all along what your detractors have claimed: you are no true servant of this kingdom, but yet loyal to your birthplace. And now you have let agents into this very palace, to give them the opportunity to steal one of the sacred treasures of my house. Do you deny it, o wife?”_

_“I deny it,”_ said the queen. Her voice was shaking now. _“I deny it, my husband; and thrice, I say, it was not I.”_

_“You are a liar, my queen. And so you shall be my queen no longer. You have dishonoured your office, woman. Your life is forfeit.”_

“Tony,” hissed Steve.

_“Not yet.”_

_“I wondered how long it would take you to get to the point,”_ the queen said, her voice still shaking – but now Steve could hear the rage in every word, previously cloaked in fear. _“So you shall kill me, as you killed my husband; and will you kill my son? I dare you to do so, you filth-stained demonspawn – do it! Slay the last of my husband’s line, and the land shall rise against you, and drown you in blood!”_

There was a pause. _“A feeble attempt,”_ said the sorcerer at last. _“I am not so easily manipulated as_ that _. But your son... ah, by the time I am finished, he shall give his life willingly to me – as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of heaven, and deliver this kingdom eternally into my hands.”_

There was a gasp, an indrawn breath, and – _“That’s our cue,”_ said Tony, and dropped them through the roof.

The silk didn’t tear into pieces beneath their weight: instead the strip they’d landed on ripped from where it was nailed into wooden beams and crashed down with them, its edges cracking like a whip. A woman, her head raised high, whirled to face them; another form – the sorcerer – began to drag himself free of the heavy sheet of cloth that had flattened him. He had a bare blade – a massive thing, but Steve could tell from a glance that it was perfectly balanced, and probably quite a bit lighter than it should have been if it were made of steel. That, or the sorcerer possessed strength beyond Steve’s – it was a toss-up as to which it was.

“Guǐlǎo!” spat the sorcerer, stumbling to his feet. “How _dare_ you?”

_“Usually double, on occasion double-dog,”_ said Tony, incomprehensibly. _“Almost always drunk.”_

“Put the sword down,” said Steve, because somebody had to be to the point. Something moved –

“GUAR-urk,” said the sorcerer, stumbling to his knees.

Two thin needles, perhaps a quarter-inch in diameter each, had appeared through the sorcerer’s throat as if by magic; and there was a hole between them, where a third needle might have gone, except that apparently it had been thrown with such force that it had continued on out the other side – indeed, it was now sticking out of the heavy silk screen somewhat behind and to the left of Steve. 

Steve cast his gaze back forward, to where the queen was standing, her form the perfect finishing stance for having thrown a knife – or a set of needles. Given the way her hair was now tumbling down her back, apparently they had been some sort of hair-ornaments. 

The screen door began to slide open; a heavy, ponderous movement even with the weight of at least two people behind it, judging by the number of hands filling the gap. Unless that was just one four-(or more)-armed person. Steve glanced between the queen, the sorcerer dying on the floor, steadying himself. But Tony lunged toward him and the world went bright, vivid –

“Your Majesty, you called for us?” the guard inquired, bowing low in the entrance. He did, Steve noticed, indeed have four arms. 

“Yes,” said the sorcerer’s voice, right in Steve’s ear. He nearly turned and decked Tony before his brain caught up to his instincts: he could _feel_ the iron grip that Tony had on his arm, but it was the sorcerer who appeared to be standing next to Steve; the body on the floor had vanished. “I’m going to be spending the night with my wife. Take yourselves and join the search, and establish your perimeter about the palace; allow none in or out. I do not wish to be disturbed before dawn.”

“It will be done, your majesty,” said the guard, bowing again. He had not raised his eyes above the floor, and he walked out backwards. There was a tense, still moment, as the guards heaved the screen back into place, and then as footsteps faded away outside.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Steve murmured to Tony, as the illusion around him melted away. The world dimmed and became ordinary again.

Ordinary. Not lifeless. Although in the brief time it had taken, a life had been lost; the sorcerer breathed out one last breath, and it was as if that breath was all that he was: the robes he had been wearing collapsed with a gust of wind. 

_“Well, that solves that problem,”_ said Tony quietly, ignoring Steve’s half-spoken question. _“Although we should keep our voices down; I’m not sure how good their hearing is.”_

Steve didn’t relax, and didn’t press the question, either. The queen was now standing with her hands folded into her sleeves, perfectly composed and demure, but when she’d moved, she’d moved _fast_. Maybe not as fast as one of the superzombies, but faster than him – and she’d just killed a man. Granted, a man who had been planning to frame her for murder and kill her son, but – 

Okay, he had to admit he was having a hard time finding a ‘but’ here. Violence ought to be the last resort – _but_... hell. What had _they_ been going to do with the sorcerer?

“Sorcerers you may be also, yet I owe you a great debt,” said the queen, her voice trembling – rage? Triumph? Shock? It was hard to tell; her face was as expressionless as a mannequin’s. It was a bit creepy, actually. “I have been trying to slay him since I learned the truth; but he has not turned his back to me since he slew my husband. You provided me with the first opportunity to strike I have had in three years, and you have my eternal gratitude.”

Somehow, Steve kept himself from grinding his teeth.

Somehow, they’d ended up toppling a foreign government anyway. And he couldn’t even say they were wrong to do it. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He hadn’t _known_ if it was wrong from the start, and he still didn’t.

“I can give you the keys to the treasury – ” she strode forward and knelt gracefully at the muddle of robes that the sorcerer had left behind, rifling through them and coming up with several items: a set of large, oddly-shaped keys on a keychain; two scrolls; a brilliant scarlet-red feather – this the queen snapped in two without delay, hiding the halves somewhere within the folds of her own elaborate gown – a knife; and a thin rod about one foot long, intricately carved. “Take it, I beg you,” she said, offering the key-ring from where she knelt, “take any of this. But let me beg you for the life of my son. He is but a small child and an innocent.”

Tony looked at Steve – and then, as if realizing that he was still standing almost uncomfortably close to Steve, stepped away to inspect the silken walls. Apparently, he intended to leave _this_ conversation up to Steve – wasn’t that swell of him?

“Ma’am, I’m afraid you misunderstand,” Steve tried, and managed to catch himself before he could add, _‘I’m afraid this was an accident.’_ “We were not here to _kill_ anyone – we came to investigate the death of your husband. We’re certainly not going to harm your son. And we don’t need the key to the treasury, either – we’re not going to rob you. Or stick around. The kingdom’s yours.”

“Then – you knew,” said the queen. “Word got out. He was not so careful as he thought.” She cast a derisive look at the empty robes, before composing herself to placidity again. “I do not know what grievance you had against the charlatan, but I thank you for your intervention. For my vengeance, I owe you my life. And I owe you more than that, for I am a poor woman who must beg a favour: if you shall spare my son, then please, I beg you, take him with you when you go.”

 _“Uh,”_ said Tony, over the comm. only. 

“That’s really not – a good idea,” Steve settled on.

“To send a child away with a sorcerer, willingly?” The queen’s smile was as thin and sharp as a sliver. “A thousand mothers would scream and wail, rend their hair, and become murderers, to prevent such a thing from coming to pass. But if you shall not stay and spare him, then you shall not spare him by going, either. I cannot rule this kingdom; my husband married me for love, but my country and his have little lost between them, and his disappearance shall spell my doom: if his nobles do not have my head, then the people shall. No, an honourable suicide is the most I can hope for myself, if I can arrange it before they throw me to the executioner in disgrace. I cannot have even that hope for my son: there are too many snakes in this court and he has not yet seen his seventh full year. _Please_ ,” she bowed down, prostrating herself fully, “Please, take him with you. You have shown that even a sorcerer can have honour – that is less than he would be taught here by his enemies, once I am dead.”

Her words were like honey, pouring over his mind – Steve shook his head, hard, trying to clear them away long enough that he could think about what she’d actually _said_. The sorcerer was dead, then – and if the people liable to get into power would use a small boy as a pawn... oh, _Hell_. They were supposed to be trying not to get involved in this!

Too late for that. “Please stand up. Your husband – was he a good man?” he asked instead.

“Yes,” said the queen quietly, her face still pressed against the ground. It made Steve want to kneel down, himself, and raise her up; except he wasn’t sure that he could bear to touch her – the mere thought of it felt like the basest form of disrespect. “He was naive, and too wont to see the good in everyone; that is how the sorcerer gained entrance to our court. But his courage was fiercer than any raging wildfire, and his love great enough to bring two warring nations to a peace, however uneasy; and I loved him as I loved the wind, the rain, the storm.”

_Damnit._

“Stay here until dawn,” said Steve firmly. “We’ll be back before then. No suicide. No rash actions. And stop trying to _convince_ us like that.”

“You have my thanks,” she replied, without lifting her head. Something in Steve’s chest eased. She still seemed regal – but no longer almost sacrilegiously so.

“And – _please_ get up,” he added, half in an embarrassed mutter. To the side, he saw Tony turn back toward them, one hand coming up – much like a peace offering.

The queen didn’t move. Steve sighed, and stepped over to grab Tony’s hand; Tony hit the repulsors the moment their fingertips touched, and they were ten feet in the air by the time the maglock engaged, locking Steve firmly to the armour. Tony didn’t say a word.

“Oh, shut up,” Steve said anyway. The words left a bitter taste in his mouth.

 

 

They touched down to find that the entire monastery was still awake, despite it now being very late; apparently they were all eager to learn as soon as possible of the fruits of Steve and Tony’s trip. The monks clustered around them as Tripitaka stepped forward, looking disappointed that they didn’t have a corpse with them.

“You didn’t manage to find him? But you are back sooner than I’d thought you would be – dawn is still hours off.”

“No, we got him,” Steve said grimly. “We got the sorcerer, too – he’s dead. I think. He didn’t leave a corpse.”

“Such is the fate of those who practice sorcery,” said one of the monks to general nods of agreement.

“Well, then that is excellent!” said Tripitaka. “I shall journey forth and bring the rightful king back, and he may resume his throne unimpeded; and perhaps then the dry and wet seasons shall resume their proper placements within the year. But where _is_ the body?”

_“Less ‘body’, more ‘bones’. I’ve got it in a subspace pocket. Where are we doing this?”_

“Here would be wise,” said Tripitaka. “The monks can watch over our bodies while our souls journey forth to the underworld.” No sooner had he spoken then several of the elder monks began to give directions, to clear a space and give those who were to travel room; and to fetch mats, pillows, and a great deal of incense. Junior monks scurried off, while those who were to be spectators respectfully withdrew a ways.

 _“We don’t know these people,”_ said Tony quietly, as soon as they had even a slight amount of clearance. _“I’m sure they’re... faithful, or appear to be, but we should be careful.”_

“How much resistance are we expecting to see in the underworld?” asked Steve.

“It mostly comes down to luck,” Tripitaka admitted. “There are all manner of threats there. Do not worry for our corporeal forms, Tony; Yulong is nearby.”

 _“He’s... not exactly great on land,”_ said Tony, not very diplomatically. _“I’ll stay behind – if it goes south I can fly you two away to safety, even if you’re not ‘back’.”_

“No,” Tripitaka shook his head. “It comes down to luck,” he repeated, “but I think your presence could tip the scales; your lances of light are powerful, and your strange ability to recognize demons is worth even more where we go now.”

_“It’s too big a risk.”_

“Yet you cannot be spared. No, no more arguments,” Tripitaka said, frowning, “look – the incense is lit.”

Indeed it was, and Steve found himself instantly associating the strange, smoky-sweet scent of it with the grave, even though he could have sworn he’d never smelled it before. But it did bring sudden clarity to Tony’s reluctance – he had been to an underworld before, the worst of all possible afterlives he could have visited. So if he was reluctant to venture into another... no, it wasn’t out of fear of danger, Steve was pretty certain of that. Even if Tony had – broken, and Lord the word was painful to think – even then, it had been under threat of deliberate, merciless torture, not fear of pain or the unknown.

But he had made and lost a friend there.

“I think we can trust them,” Steve said softly, indicating with a slight tilt of his head the monks standing all around them – albeit at a respectful distance, now that the last of the incense-bearers had retreated. “We could use you on this one.”

Tony stared at him – or, well, the Iron Man mask stared at Steve. Who knew what Tony was actually looking at? But after a long moment, the armour’s shoulders slumped slightly. _“Alright.”_

“Bring out the corpse, then,” said Tripitaka, looking at them expectantly.

_“You might want to stand back.”_

Steve and Tripitaka shuffled a half dozen feet backward. The armour stared at them motionlessly. They shuffled back further, and Steve put his hands over his ears.

The panels on Tony’s armour unhooked again, and he went to one knee. The sound this time was different – it wasn’t something ripping out of the world, but rather like the world held its breath; the air stilled, all sound ceased – and then things _appeared_ out of thin air, with a cacophony of sound, every frequency imaginable. Steve reeled backward, staggered by the combination of base and screechingly high-pitched whines.  He could _see_ some of the monks making exclamations of surprise – their mouths were moving – but he couldn’t hear anything.

Tony didn’t appear to notice that he’d just deafened everyone; instead, he’d stepped forward and begun sorting through everything that he’d just dumped out his ‘pocket’. The skeleton and grave-dirt was there, of course, filling Steve’s nose with its dour, earthy odour – but it was by no means the only thing. There were sheets of metal stacked on top of each other – gold, but also many variations on silvery stuff – and a large plastic jar full of something that looked like sand. Three arc reactors had rolled to the ground – they had a partial case that had prevented them from shattering against the flagstones of the courtyard, but _what_ they were was clearly visible. Other items were less clear, but not because they were enveloped in packing tape – on the contrary, it seemed like Tony had meant to be able to get at this stuff in a hurry. There was a laptop; several external hard-drives; some more computer equipment that Steve didn’t recognize; a telescope, or possibly a spyglass; a rolled set of poster-sized paper – that made Steve blink; a phone; something that might have been an oversized tape measure in a past life; quite a lot of tinfoil; several antennae of various lengths, unattached to anything; duct tape; and a few cans of WD40. Remarkably, nothing except the skeleton appeared to have been covered by the grave dirt, which was now spilling all over the ground.

The panels on the armour’s forearms rotated – which was to say, their bases slid around his arms clockwise – and Steve didn’t quite realize in time that he should again put his hands over his ears to prevent himself from going _totally_ deaf from the great thunderous rip that vanished everything except the skeleton, its dirt, and three sheets of differently-tinted foil. Several of the monks, including Tripitaka, fell over.

“You could have warned the monks,” Steve said, with the peculiar sensation of not actually _hearing_ himself say it. Damn. Had he ruptured his eardrums? That could cause big problems, if Tripitaka was injured like that.

Tony tilted his head – was that meant to be apologetic? Without any commentary, and moving as stiffly as he tended to around Tripitaka, Tony in the Iron Man armour was a cipher. Maybe it wasn’t an apology. Tony picked up the metal sheets and crumpled them into a ball, then tossed it back and forth from hand to hand.

Tripitaka waved his hands, gesturing for them to sit down, with the corpse as a gruesome centrepiece. They did so, Steve taking advantage of a mat, while Tripitaka padded his knees with pillows; Tony just sat on the stone. The complete and utter silence in Steve’s ears had given way to that familiar ringing from before; hopefully the rest of his hearing would return as quickly as it had then.

Tripitaka, if he had been deafened, didn’t seem to be bothered by it: he was chanting, though from what Steve could tell by an attempt at lip-reading, it was a chant of entirely nonsense syllables, just like the mantra of constriction. Gradually, they became audible. The short way he said them, and the deliberate inflection on each, reminded Steve far more of what he’d heard of Mandarin and Cantonese than the English that Tripitaka had been speaking... although it probably wasn’t English, really. Whatever let Steve _hear_ it in English mustn’t have extend to this sort of thing, because he couldn’t make any sense of the sounds as Tripitaka continued to chant, dragging him... down...

Steve’s feet hit something solid and he stumbled, struggling to regain the balance he’d suddenly lost at finding himself standing while his body still thought it was sitting. He didn’t fall – but the feeling that he was _actually_ sitting down, and that if he tried to step forward he’d turn into a pretzel, didn’t go away. A _thump_ alerted him to Tripitaka losing his own battle against the dissonance; Steve leaned down, trying not to feel as though he were folding himself in half, and picked the monk up, setting him on his feet again. He didn’t let go of Tripitaka’s robes, either, because there was something very important missing from this picture. “Where’s Tony?”

Oh. His hearing was back – at least, it was _here_ , wherever here was.

Tripitaka blinked and glanced around, quick furtive glances in-between returning to studied contemplation of the sky – Steve glanced upward, but it was just a solid grey – and taking quick breaths. He looked a bit green. “I don’t know. He should have come. Here, we must try again.”

A sound in the background that Steve hadn’t even registered – a distant voice, still chanting – stopped, and Steve nearly fell over backwards – wait, he was sitting upright, his legs were at right angles from his torso because he was _actually_ sitting. He checked his movement and glanced over at Tony, who was sitting as still as a statue.

“You are difficult to bring along,” said Tripitaka; his words sounding muddy and under-water, as the last of the damage to Steve’s ears healed. “Give me your hand.”

With a slowness that spoke of deep reluctance, Tony raised one hand; Tripitaka seized it in his own, and began to chant again –

Knowing what was to come, Steve forced himself not to try to move this time, until he could look down and see that his legs were straight beneath him – he was standing. Then he leaned over and picked up Tripitaka, again, from where he’d fallen, again. There was still no Tony with them.

“This is very strange,” said Tripitaka, and they were back in the real world as he said it. “Give me your other hand – both of them.”

 _“This isn’t going to work,”_ said Tony in a rush. _“I don’t have a soul.”_

Tripitaka paused. The monks murmured – and Steve could hear that now – but only for an instant, and then discipline prevailed and they were silent. Steve felt a surge of irritation, and out of reflex, guiltily suppressed it – and then found himself experiencing a much larger swell of concern. Sure, Tony was an atheist, and he’d _hated_ what Anthony had gone on about – but Steve didn’t think that was what he meant, here.

“That’s quite impossible,” said Tripitaka. “Of course you have a soul.”

 _“That’s what I said,”_ muttered Tony – and yes, that was concern, because Tony _knew_ about the gem that had let Steve see souls, knew that Anthony, even if he wore pajamas all the time, was actually pretty damn powerful. The _existence_ of souls had nothing to do with faith.

Tripitaka’s lips thinned. “Stop with this foolish avoidance, and cease resisting the summon,” he said, with a warning tone that Steve didn’t like.

 _“I’m not_ doing _anything,”_ said Tony, overtop of the beginning of Steve’s protest; Steve shut up. If Tony was able to fight this battle, Steve was more than happy to enable him. _“You’re the one dragging souls out of bodies, can’t you see whether or not I have one to begin with?”_

“But you’re a _person!_ ” said Tripitaka, with an expression of dawning horror – but not, Steve thought, at Tony. It was directed _inward_ , and wasn’t _that_ curious? “You’re my disciple! Of course you must have a soul.”

_“You tell me.”_

“Who told you that you didn’t have a soul?” asked Steve.

 _“At the monastery I went to find out about demons – there was this pig-snake... thing. Seemed to know what it was talking about.”_ Tony barely turned his head toward Steve when he spoke. _“Apparently, demonic illusions only work on people who have souls.”_

Since then, Tony had been working on trying to replicate those illusions – and failing. Had he been trying to confirm it?

“A grave-pig would know,” said Tripitaka, sounding deeply unhappy. “I am no Great Sage, to be able to see such things; I can transport, but of course transportation is a lesser skill than true seeing. Yet if a grave-pig said it, it must be so – but, oh, this is terrible! I have been treating you as a person all this time, when you are not.”

“Hey,” snapped Steve. “Soul or not, he’s a person.”

...right?

Anthony had said that a stain on Tony’s soul was driving him crazy. If he now didn’t have a soul at _all,_ what did that mean for his brain? His mind? Apparently, it meant he needed sleep now – of course, the immortality curse had been tied to Tony’s soul. Could it have been extremis?

The facts were, Tony had had a soul when Steve had last seen him in the other world, and he didn’t have one now – assuming that this grave-pig (whatever that was) could be trusted. And between now and then... every difference could come down to extremis.

“No, he’s not.” Tripitaka wrung his hands together. “A being without a soul can have no true consciousness; it means he is nothing more than a construct. And I have been treating him as a person – I have used _pain_ as a tool to teach – such a thing applied to an animal, or a construct, or a child – applied to any living thing without a proper adult soul – that is base cruelty,” he agonized, and Steve couldn’t feel a shred of sympathy for him, not over his welling hope. Tripitaka was flighty, and given to breaking his word, but if he could actually think that this was wrong, no matter the reason _why_... “I am so sorry,” the monk apologized, wretched and abject.

 _“Well,”_ said Tony after a pause. _“That’s... nice.”_

Tripitaka burst into tears.

Steve ignored him. “What happened?” he asked Tony instead, voice soft enough to hopefully not be overheard by the monks.

Tony didn’t turn toward him when he answered, continuing to face Tripitaka instead. But the answer came over the comm. line, privately, rather than aloud. _“I don’t know. It could’ve been extremis, I guess. The grave-pig said I must’ve been... constructed.”_

Constructed? He’d grown himself a new body? It suddenly made a horrifying kind of sense that he _could –_ he could apparently turn the armour into just about anything, so why not a new body? But then what had happened to the old one? People couldn’t just swap their minds in and out – _humans_ couldn’t, at least. And even JARVIS had been tethered to his servers.

 _JARVIS_. Oh, God. JARVIS had died. He’d been destroyed – and then Steve and Pepper had activated him again, but it hadn’t been him. It had been a _clone_. Somewhere back on some Earth, Tony Stark was – Tony had said he was _dying_ ; maybe he was already dead, or maybe – if the curse still clung to him – he wished he was. The Tony sitting in front of Steve, then, was just a copy – _not_ just a copy, Steve told himself firmly, privately horrified. Tony was a person. _This_ Tony was a person, no matter what any quack monk or mythical monster might have to say about it.

“Do you know what happened to the – ” Steve cut himself off, fixed his wording; this Tony was _real_ ; “ – original you?”

Another pause, several seconds’ worth this time. _“No.”_

“If... he’s dead, or,” oh, Lord. He’d yelled at Tony for breaking his promise to be right behind him – because Tony... Tony might be _dead_. _That_ Tony. And here was another one, in front of him – how?

 _“I hadn’t even thought about it,”_ said Tony, and he sounded slightly dazed. _“I – I’m_ me _. I thought it got taken_ away _– oh, Jesus. The grave-pig said it couldn’t – Jesus, I didn’t even think about it, why didn’t I think of it – ”_

“You are you,” said Steve, “You’re a person, Tony, no matter what the Hell Tripitaka thinks. You’re a person, and you’re my friend.”

He was. Even if he was a clone – he had all of Tony’s memories, he had to be an actual person. Steve had been travelling with him for weeks... even if he’d never met him before in this body – extremis hadn’t changed his personality that much. Had it?

He’d known Tony for only day before Tony had fallen through time and space; in then the six months after that he’d failed to notice that Tony didn’t need to eat or sleep, and was apparently going insane; then he’d found Tony, sane but having forgotten him – and no sooner had Tony remembered than he was gone again, missing –

Steve kept feeling like he knew Tony, but when it came down to it, maybe Steve had never really known him at all. Pepper – Pepper would know. When they got back, Steve would go looking for her – maybe it wouldn’t keep her safe, but he rather thought she’d want to know anyway.

 _“Of course I am,”_ said Tony, his voice calm and fond. _“You can always count on that, Steve.”_ It was like he’d flicked a switch – rebooted himself –

Maybe he _had_.

Steve swallowed, and forced his thoughts to stillness. Tripitaka’s sobs had wound down – he was now just sniffling, wiping his nose and face on a loose fold of his robe. The monks around them were all averting their eyes politely, some speaking amongst themselves of unrelated matters – weather, recent crop failures, speculation: on whether the king would change anything once he was returned to life and his throne; on whether the prince could be considered loyal after being raised by an imposter for three of his most impressionable years; on whether the common people might not grow to love their foreign queen more after learning the truth behind the rift between her and her husband for the last three years.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” a more elderly monk said to a group of four speculating about that last. “If the sorcerer is now dead then his deception may never be revealed; after all, with a sorcerer there is never a body to display as proof. The king claiming that he has been dead and impersonated for three years will make him seem crazy, and the kingdom even weaker than it already is after these past terrible three years. No, very few will ever know of our queen’s commendable loyalty and clear sight: but the king shall know, and given how besotted with each other they were when they married, no doubt he shall be all the more willing to listen to her wisdom in the future.”

Steve glanced upward at the sky. It was still pitch dark, but the monk’s words had recalled urgency to them – they didn’t know how long it might take to bring the king back from the underworld, after all. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be just a walking skeleton when he got back. If Tony didn’t have a soul... then the repercussions were something that Steve would need to think about, but not here and now. Right now, it just meant that he wasn’t coming with them.

“Tripitaka,” said Steve. “We need to hurry this up. We made the queen promise to wait until dawn, but after that... I think she might commit suicide.”

Tripitaka’s eyes grew as round as saucers, and he wiped his nose on his robe one last time. “Honourable death to accompany her husband? Oh, no. You are correct – we must go.”

“Tony,” Steve said. “Watch our backs.”

_“Always.”_

Tripitaka took a deep breath, and if his voice was unsteady when he began the chant, it quickly evened out. The transition to the underworld was even easier the third time, as was retaining his balance once he got there. Tripitaka, it seemed, didn’t learn quite so fast – a ‘thump’ marked him falling over and then he scrambled to his feet again.

Despite his dislike of Tripitaka, Steve found himself asking, “Why don’t we just do this standing up?”

“Then our bodies would fall over, and that is even more disorienting,” said Tripitaka with a shudder. “And once the body is lying down, it is impossible to walk in this place; gravity is wrong.” He peered about the grey mists and sighed in disappointment. “I had hoped the king would be here to greet us; such an active ghost may come very near to the borders of life and death in reality as well as in dreams. But it seems that we must venture deeper in. Be on your guard.”

Steve tried staring into the depths, but saw nothing more than he had on his first two trips here. This place’s most remarkable feature was how utterly featureless it was. The ground was some kind of grey stone – he kicked at it – or maybe dirt, spread unnaturally evenly without appearing to have been laid down by someone. This didn’t change, in any direction, as far as Steve could see; eventually, the grey ground merged with the gentle grey mist in the air, creating an almost seamless join with the – surprise, surprise: grey – sky. There was no one else around, living _or_ dead.

“Which way do we go?” asked Steve.

Tripitaka’s expression was grim as he turned himself around, checking the sky – Steve turned around, too, ignoring the twinge in the base of his skull that told him his spine should have snapped with the motion. “Backwards.”

They started walking – at Tripitaka’s pace, which was pretty slow. Steve kept a wary eye out, but for all of Tripitaka’s dire warnings, nothing immediately appeared to try to eat them. Monsters continued to not appear as they kept walking, but the creepy mist made it easy to stay on his guard. The ominous, discordant chanting he could just _vaguely_ hear – but only when he wasn’t trying to – made it even easier, even though he knew that it was only Tripitaka, back in his body, chanting the spell to keep them there. Though how somebody’s body could keep chanting a spell, yet not manage to stand on its own... well, Steve wasn’t a magician, or a sorcerer – or any sort of magic-user. Or high-level-science-user, as Tony would say.

But he had a pretty good sense of time, and they were rapidly running out of it. “Are we actually going anywhere?” he asked Tripitaka.

A slight stir of air, and Steve turned to look; the shadowed outline of a bird winged its way overhead– an owl, he saw, as it came briefly came close enough to not be so obscured by the mists. It made Tripitaka nod, still grim and unhappy. “We are on the right path.”

“That is a matter of perspective,” said a voice from near Steve’s left knee.

Steve _jumped_ back, shoving Tripitaka behind him – and then immediately felt the heat of embarrassment colour his face. It was, improbably, a housecat. A rather _large_ housecat, admittedly, one that would have put any of the old Toms in his childhood Brooklyn to shame... and one that could talk. Actually, Steve really _didn’t_ know that it wasn’t dangerous. What was ‘just’ a cat, down in the world of the dead?

Tripitaka looked pleased by it, though, and bowed deeply to the creature. “Cat, you do us honour with your presence.”

“Of course I do,” said the cat – somehow, not arrogantly: it was just stating a fact, and one that Steve found himself inclined to agree with before he realized what he was thinking. “You looked like you might be of some amusement. Who are you?”

“I am the monk Tripitaka, and this is my disciple, Steve Rogers,” Tripitaka did the introductions. Steve bit his tongue before he could object. They were talking to a creature from the underworld – in this, he supposed, he _was_ following Tripitaka. Even if he hated the thought of it.

The cat looked deeply unimpressed. “You are _not_ Tripitaka.”

“Not the original, no,” said Tripitaka anxiously. “But I was appointed to go to the west by the Bodhisattva Kuan-Yin.”

“If you are aiming to go west, then you are _certainly_ not on the right path,” said the cat, with a rumbling purr that could almost have been a growl. It paced around them, and Steve found himself edging out of its way – which was ridiculous. It was a cat. Not a tiger.

Then again, Yulong was a dragon...

The cat winked at him.

“We’re taking a detour,” said Steve. “We need to find the king of the local realm above and return him to life before war breaks out, civil or otherwise.”

“A worthy goal,” said the cat, seeming to settle back into its skin again – less a tiger, more a cat. Even though it was the _exact_ same size. “You have both strength and courage to be willing to come here, and at another time I’d be very interested to see how you might fare deeper in; but though honourable in itself, your cause here is not one worthy of delaying your journey above. Time is running very short, mortals.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tripitaka in a small voice.

“Heaven is under siege.” The cat settled onto its haunches and began to lick its paws, its eyes half-squeezing shut. “Your friend has done something catastrophically stupid.”

“Tony?” Shit. What _now?_

“Yes. I’d hurry it up if I were you – things are all falling to pieces. West has become east, and east west; north and south are both pointing rather downward; it is all a muddle. Very dirty.” Although the words were without inflection, something in the cat’s fur managed to give the strong impression that it did _not_ like dirt.

“What’s Tony done?” And, though he hated it – it would have to be asked at some point: _which_ Tony?

“If anyone were quite sure, it wouldn’t be such a problem,” said the cat. It lowered its paws and gave them both a gimlet stare. “The king is standing twelve feet to your left. I’d take him and go, before anyone notices he’s missing.”

“What – ” Steve tried, _tried_ to keep the cat in his field of view – but even though he’d have sworn he kept it just at the edge of his vision, between one second and the next it was no longer there; there was nothing sudden about its departure, just an absence that clearly announced the cat was gone.

The king, on the other hand, was just as suddenly _there_ – had the cat brought him? Steve had no idea. He seemed to be a young-ish man – he couldn’t have been older than thirty at most – despite having some premature grey hairs; he was dressed in rich clothes that fairly popped with colour against the dismal background. “Oh!” he exclaimed, sounding pleased. “Here you are.”

“So we are,” said Tripitaka, crossing over to take the king’s hand. And then his chanting stopped, and they were elsewhere – they were back in their bodies. The king was sitting up with grave-dirt all over him – but he wasn’t a skeleton. He was even wearing the same clothes that he’d had on as a soul.

 _“Okay, that was... interesting,”_ murmured Tony in Steve’s ear. _“That could give Bruce a run for his money. So long as it’s the correct guy?”_

“According to the talking cat, it was,” said Steve, standing up.

“That was the White Tiger, the Guardian of the West,” said the not-so-dead king, standing up and brushing dirt from himself. He managed to make the gesture look regal despite the stains that remained, and despite being even shorter than Tripitaka. “That he showed himself is a great blessing upon your journey – and upon my return. Holy monk,” he turned to Tripitaka and bowed, “devoted disciples,” he bowed in turn to Steve and Tony each, “you have my very great thanks.”

“You are welcome,” said Tripitaka, but he still looked troubled. Well, he’d been troubled before they’d left – hopefully, he was still feeling bad for torturing Tony. Steve couldn’t spare him much sympathy.

 _“We better get you back to your palace,”_ said Tony, standing as well in a fluid, yet highly mechanical motion. _“I think your queen can fill you in from there.”_

“Oh my queen, I know well her loyalty,” said the king, for a moment sounding utterly besotted – and then he smoothed out his face to blankness, much like how his queen had covered her own emotions. Maybe it was a royal thing. “And my son! I wonder if he will not have forgotten me entirely...”

“I’m sure he’ll remember you soon,” said Steve, but it was a bit doubtful. He couldn’t remember much of his own father, after all, who had died when Steve was a similar age to the prince... but this boy had his father _back_. And probably hadn’t realized his dad was missing in the first place.

 _“Grab hold,”_ said Tony, offering the king an arm, and, privately, _“Sorry, Steve. One passenger flight only.”_

Steve grimaced, and held in his objection. Tony didn’t need to spare an arm to carry _him_ , not with the maglock – but if he didn’t want to take more than two people, well, Tony was the pilot. And the engineer. Plus, they were in a hurry – apparently, they needed to get to Maklu before whatever Tony had been trying to do had time to... what? Destroy it? That seemed pretty far-fetched, whether it was meant to be accidental _or_ on purpose.

Steve stood back, watching a dead man be carried into the sky by a twenty-year-younger clone of one of his closest friends, contemplating what that friend might have done to make space and time go sideways – because Steve had been given a warning by a talking cat while he was having an out-of-body experience to go to the underworld.

Far-fetched? More like _highly likely_.

“Honoured Sage,” said an elderly monk whom Steve recalled seeing before, but only at a distance – he had been hanging in the back of the crowd – “Forgive me. I doubted my brothers and sisters who believed you could venture forth into the Underworld and bring back our king, but you have done so, and in the doing restored the balance of the kingdom. Please, will you stay a while, and share even the smallest part of your wisdom with us?”

“Oh,” said Tripitaka, looking both pleased and discomfited. “Well, er. I haven’t gotten a chance to do much teaching since I started this journey...”

“We’re in a hurry,” said Steve, pitching his voice to be heard only by Tripitaka’s ears.

“Oh,” said Tripitaka again, deflating a bit. “I’m sorry, brother, but my disciple reminds me of what is right and true. While in the Underworld we were honoured to meet the White Tiger, and he impressed upon us the importance of haste. As soon as my other disciple returns, we must set out.”

At this the monks all looked disappointed – until the one that had greeted them first of all clapped her hands, and said, “Then we must ensure provisions are made! You, you, and you,” she nabbed trio of young monks with a glance, “no shirking, now, I’ll need your help...”

The rest of the monks began to disperse to their chores. Tripitaka stared after them mournfully. “I do miss teaching – teaching those with _open_ minds.” He turned to consider Steve.

Steve stared back at him, keeping his gaze level, and focused on not _saying_ anything. At length, Tripitaka sighed and turned away, his shoulders slumped once more.

 

 

 

“Tony.” Steve’s voice was low, barely audible to human ears – and as clear as a bell to any of Tony’s mics, whether the one in Steve’s comm. unit or the ones he had scattered about the armour.

 _“Mmhmm?”_ Tony thought back in reply – thought made audible; who needed lips? Lips were slow, clumsy things – so was human speech, for that matter. It was a damn good thing that several parts of him had been tapped into eavesdropping on designated VIPs, back when he’d gotten lost in the internet – other bits of him hadn’t been in positions where they’d needed to decipher human speech in real-time, and when he’d all come back together... it had been hard enough to slow down again, to make such plodding sounds _comprehensible_ , even with parts of him that _did_ have recent practice in the art. Without those...

He banished the thought. Steve was talking; since he hadn’t been paying attention enough to switch over to real-time processing, Tony’s audio centres filtered each word and compressed their meanings into tiny fragments of data that were delivered in pico-second bursts. It made for a terrible way of listening; he’d already forgotten about the previous word by the time the data for the next arrived. The switch only took a few pico-seconds itself, and then he replayed what Steve had actually said, stringing it together so that it made sense:

“What aren’t you – telling me?” 

_oh, joy_

_“Well,_ that’s _not of a loaded question,”_ said Tony cautiously. What wasn’t he telling Steve? Jesus Christ. The relative location of Asgard – of Maklu – of Earth; calculated wormhole routes from the quantum processors; the _plans_ he had, not-so-very deep in his head, of Armageddon weapons; the results of his attempts at fabricating some of them.

If he was a clone, a copy – suddenly some of those weapons became a lot more viable. Test runs had always been too risky – what if he succeeded at incapacitating himself, but not at destroying his soul? Or what if he _did_ succeed, but it didn’t work the way he thought it might? Yet now... seriously, why hadn’t he thought of copying himself over before?

Or, well, apparently he _had_ , but that memory hadn’t been downloaded into this new body along with the rest of them. Which left the question – why _not?_

“There was a – cat down in the – underworld,” said Steve, apparently forgetting to keep his voice hushed this time.

Tripitaka overheard, from his position atop Yulong’s saddle. “That was no cat; the king said he only appeared to be such. In truth, he was as his shadow cast him: the White Tiger.”

They were back in the road, having left the monastery in something of a hurry, with bags full of supplies and little to no rest achieved by those who needed it – which didn’t include Tony, thanks; his hour had been plenty. But Steve looked like he could have used a nap – except that he’d been in full agreement with Tripitaka that the needed to hit the road as soon as possible, and neither of them had been inclined to explain at the time. Which... meant that they probably blamed him. 

 _oh joy_ Tony thought again, which did, possibly, make him feel a little tired.

“It said that Maklu – was under threat – that it was breaking apart,” said Steve evenly – remarkably evenly, considering the pace at which they were sprinting along the road had him breathing pretty hard. “Because of something you’d done?”

_okay genuinely wasn’t expecting_ that...

“The White Tiger’s mere presence is an indicator of what now assails Heaven,” said Tripitaka dismally. “Ever has he been the Guardian of the _West_.”

 _“Right,”_ said Tony slowly, _“And we’re going... ah._ ” Because if they were _going_ west, then they were _approaching_ from the east. Okay, that was pretty stupid of him – he shut down some of the other programs he’d had running and turned more of his brain over to the present conversation. If there was something of Prophetic Importance going on, and apparently he was at threat of blowing up a realm, or something –

The last time he’d been in a death god’s realm, he’d not listened to Hel’s advice – or taken her offer. And sure, the reasons she’d given for it had been a pack of lies, but the offer itself –

He was such a moron.

 _“What_ exactly _did it say?”_ he demanded.

“That Heaven was under – siege,” said Steve, still keeping his tone even – neutral. That was good; there was only the slightest trace of judgement in there, of censure. Steve had a better poker face than Tony’d realized. “That east was west and west was east – I guess that’s demonstrated – and that everything else was pointing in – weird directions too, all messed up. Things were falling to pieces. And that _you’d_ – done something pretty stupid – except nobody was sure what it was.”

 _“Great, that makes all of us,”_ Tony muttered. _“I’ve done a lot of stupid things, Cap, if you want me to list all of them it’ll take me all day.”_

“We don’t have anything – better to be talking about,” Steve pointed out.

 _“Steve, the last time I was told something like that by a death god, it wasn’t actually anything_ I’d _done... yet. Possibly. Depends on your point of view.”_ Something he _would_ be doing? Given the way this place mucked with space-time... and it was connected to the prime worlds of this cluster, too. Maybe moving backwards in time would be possible, here, as it wasn’t in the branch-worlds. Maybe death-gods in general just had good foresight.

Given what he was carrying around in his subspace pocket, things he _might_ do had real application. If Loki was in Maklu – all bets were off.

Not that he thought Loki was, though, or he’d have siphoned processor space to return to the ever-thorny problem of how to make it a quicker draw. Unfortunately, he couldn’t look _into_ the subspace pocket to see what he was pulling out – not without leaving it vulnerable to being opened by anyone else with a subspace reducer – and so had to jump out _everything_ whenever he was searching for even one item. But, hey, if there was a real chance that Loki _was_ in Maklu – as indicated by the idea of him doing something really stupid – then he _should_ be working on getting it out quickly.

If not, then it would just have to wait until after he got the key to curing extremis, could write up a patch for it, and send Steve back home to dole it out to the masses. Although at that point he’d be going around openly armed with the thing, so a quicker subspace draw wouldn’t be necessary...

oh, he realized, and could have laughed out loud. _of course_

He was a clone. He was a clone, carrying around a WMD – of course he was a clone. Really, the _first_ thing he should have thought of was the question of how many versions of him were out there. But that was probably bound up in why his original self had deleted the knowledge of being a clone. No wonder Steve had had to think of it for him. Did that mean that he should stop speculating about it?

“I’d like it to not be – your fault,” Steve admitted. “But your first response doesn’t exactly – inspire confidence, Tony.”

Tony sighed. _“I have quantum and conventional processor nodes spread throughout my body to allow for heavily distributed computing –_ thinking _, Steve. If I were to try to explain to you everything I’m doing, even just the things that could potentially end horribly for somebody – lemme put it like this: we’ll get to Maklu first. Right now I’m mostly working on filling an in the eleven-dimensional map of the universe, because this road is one gigantic inter-galactic highway – ”_ inter-galactic, inter-reality, same difference – _“ – and I’m trying to convince myself not to attempt to hack it. Since I haven’t made the attempt yet, I’d say I’ve been pretty successful so far.”_

“Do _not_ break the Great Road,” said Tripitaka sternly, igniting half a dozen panic subroutines.

_and that’s a pretty good incentive not to..._

_stopstopstopstopstoppleasestop_

“And what else are you – working on?” Steve asked relentlessly. “I’m not asking for details, Tony – I’m asking for a general idea. You asked me to come along. Part of being in a team – is having somebody to bounce off – of. To check they’re not real _dumb_.”

_ shit why not  _ _“I told you I design WMDs in my head. I don’t have any plans to use ‘em on Maklu. But I’ve got a god to kill, and I’m sure he’s not going down easily.”_

Steve’s eyes widened. “If he’s in Maklu – ”

_“Cross that bridge when we get to it, Steve.”_

“So you have at least – one with you.” Ooo, smart.

The lie came without hesitation. This baring of his soul – hah! – had gone too far. _“No.”_

“You said – ”

 _“You asked what I was working on,”_ Tony reminded him. Remorse subroutines, and guilt, and –

_stop_

Warning: critical fault processes may be affected. 

_override_

_“We’re at war, Steve. With a guy who can bend and break reality – yes, what did you_ think _I was working on?_ ” Absence of guilt, of negative emotions directed inward, led to outward-seeking anger. _“Do you think I should just stand back and let him win, let him fuck everybody over again? I’ve got plenty of_ dumb ideas _– maybe one of them can kill the son-of-a-bitch!”_

_stop_

“If you rebel against Heaven, it will not end well for you,” Tripitaka observed sadly.

 _“Probably,”_ Tony agreed. _“I’m going to scout ahead._ ” Roller-skates formed, and between one-second and the next he was rolling along the road instead of running, while he realigned the repulsors at the backs of his ankles.

“Wait,” said Steve.

 _“Save it for tonight,”_ Tony snapped, and hit the thrusters.

 

 

 

 _The problem with wonky space-time’s the same as the problem with the twenty-first century,_ Steve thought sourly. _No good radio._

It was night – late night; he, Yulong, and Tripitaka had run for hours past sundown before Steve, after stumbling one time too many, had given into the inevitable and indicated they should stop and camp by the side of the road. Fortunately, they were again in an area of only semi-civilization, and so weren’t squatting on any farmer’s fields to do so. Unfortunately, they hadn’t caught up to Tony, and Tony hadn’t returned on his own.

_Not exactly your most diplomatic moment, Rogers._

He was beginning to wonder why Tony _had_ asked him to come with him on this trip. Tony had said he _needed_ Steve to come – why? In the beginning Tony had told him things – explained things – but he was working on WMDs and an entire world was under threat from him: something that would have seemed crazy back in those innocent days before a zombie plague threatened all of Earth. And Tony didn’t even seem to regret it. Seemed to think it was necessary.

The memory of Amora’s nigh-infinite soul, stretched out behind and beside and beyond her, made Steve’s hand pause as he stirred the beans cooking in the pot. Tony had seen Loki kill not a world, but a universe full of them – as many worlds as Amora had had selves. Steve hadn’t been able to see an end to her – she had been, in that moment, as great as God. She wasn’t, of course – she was no more God than Steve was – but she was... _more_...than any mortal.

Steve tried to imagine countless Earths in the place of her countless reflections, and couldn’t.

But Tony had wanted Steve to come. Maybe he’d wanted Steve to stop him from dooming one more world – if that was going to happen.

Tripitaka came to stand beside him as he ladled dinner out into their bowls. As was usual, he took his without offering thanks or even a nod of gratitude. What was _not_ usual was how he didn’t retreat to the other side of the fire after, to eat in silence while meditating, or whatever it was he did.

“You don’t respect me, do you?” the little monk asked, when Steve raised an eyebrow at him.

What was Steve supposed to say to _that?_ The obvious answer caught in his throat. Even if Tripitaka had gotten it into his head that Tony wasn’t really a person and that only people were somehow worthy of being tortured – two completely twisted ideas that had somehow combined to form a favourable outcome, but not one that Steve could trust for a moment – even if Steve hoped Tripitaka might refrain from using the collar on Tony for _Tony’s_ sake, he couldn’t trust that Tripitaka wouldn’t use it to get back at _Steve_. He’d threatened it before, after all. Steve had travelled to the Underworld; presumably _he_ had a soul.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Steve settled on, at length.

“In my home temple,” Tripitaka said slowly, settling himself on the ground as he did – unfortunately, not on the opposite side of the fire, despite Steve’s desire to be away from him, “I was not respected because I was a small person, physically weak and clumsy. I had ideas, and meditation, but no power to force others to see them. But now I do have power, and you still don’t respect me. Is it because you are large and strong, while my strength is that of a holy power?”

Steve stabbed at the beans in his own bowl with enough force to turn them to mush. Oops. “I used to be a tiny little guy. Just as clumsy as you. Wouldn’t’ve respected you back then either. You’re a bully.”

“I’m on a holy quest,” said Tripitaka, offended, but there were tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.

Steve rolled his eyes, letting the flickering firelight hide the motion, and managed not to say anything, keeping his attention on his meal instead. The beans tasted like wet paper. Steve made himself finish them off quickly anyway – he was tired, he needed sleep, and sleeping would provide a good excuse to cut short this conversation with Tripitaka.

“I made a horrible mistake with Tony, I know,” said Tripitaka miserably. “I was foolish, and unwise.”

“Yeah, and you’re sitting there feeling sorry for yourself instead of thinking about how to make amends,” Steve snapped. He never had been much good at staying quiet. But if Tripitaka was willing to _think_ – willing to have compassion –

“If I let you leave, I will fail on my quest and never reach Heaven,” whispered Tripitaka. “That would be a great evil. This must be the lesser one. It must.” His voice grew stronger as he spoke to himself.

So much for that idea.

“Yulong, you’ve got first watch,” Steve told the dragon-horse, getting a muffled horsey noise in reply. He stuck a thick branch on the fire, to keep it going through Yulong’s watch, and laid himself out. Almost before he was fully horizontal, he was asleep.


	6. The Child Eater

The next day, they set out at dawn. Tony hadn’t returned during the night, and Steve had to wonder how much longer Tripitaka would let him stay away. No matter he what he said; actions spoke louder than words. Surely Tony had to know he was pushing his luck – as terrified as he’d been of Tripitaka earlier, it seemed likelier that he wasn’t just unwilling, but _unable_ to return.

The weather grew steadily worse as the day progressed, to the point that by noon, Steve was growing concerned. Up until now they’d been pretty lucky – if there had been rain, it had been light, and though it was occasionally cold, it didn’t get cold enough to ice the road – or maybe the road kept itself clear of such things, Steve didn’t know. But the rain that poured down now was frigid and heavy, soaking them all through, until Steve’s hands were starting to go numb even despite his gloves. His lower face, exposed without the protection offered by Tony’s ultra-resistant-to-everything materials, had long ago lost all feeling.

“I think we’d best stop for a while,” said Tripitaka, much more loudly than normal – winds were rising as well, buffeting them at random, and extra-strongly whenever they came around a corner or topped a rise. Tripitaka was probably absolutely miserable, Steve thought, glancing up – he’d pulled out two weather-resistant cloaks to wrap himself in, but since he was just _sitting_ on top of Yulong, no doubt he was freezing.

Well, he’d survive – though Steve made a note to keep an eye on him: if he started going hypothermic, they’d _have_ to stop. For now, though, Steve slowed their pace long enough to pull another grease-slicked cloak from Yulong’s saddlebags, and tossed it up to the monk. “If we stop for every bit of bad weather, we won’t make it there quick.” And they might not catch up to Tony, either, but – “How much further is it to Maklu, anyway?” He didn’t even know if that question had a meaningful answer, but hopefully it would distract Tripitaka from wanting to stop.

The question did make the monk pause for thought. “Well, my honoured namesake’s journey took fourteen years, according to most interpretations of the lore.”

Steve choked.

“But those are most popular closer to the Imperial Capital, which is at the center of the civilized world, and which I have never seen, for I was born in the very far western reaches of the Great Empire – although not quite so far west or nearly so barbaric as here. Then, too, there is to consider that my honoured namesake may have made a great many stops for weeks or months at various monasteries along the route; this is not universally agreed upon, but I think it likely; were I a more well-known or worthy scholar, to be granted such opportunities, I should do so in an instant.” Tripitaka sounded wistful at this. “But perhaps... I’m not worthy of such a thing... so it is for the best that Heaven seems to have other purposes for us. Certainly our pace has been speeded greatly since you all joined me, such that I have made more progress in the last four weeks than I had hoped to make in four months – or even a year.”

“What does that add up do?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see the border any day now,” said Tripitaka, more cheerful than he had been since they’d left the monastery.

It felt like the first good news he’d heard since they got to this world. If they were that close – Steve frowned where the road vanished behind the next hill. Tony had gone on ahead – what if he’d already crossed those borders? What if he’d gotten detained? What if that world had already broken to pieces?

“Damnit, Tony,” he muttered, half to himself and half to the comm.

The rain didn’t quite manage to turn into sleet before they topped a last rise, and were all of a sudden looking out over the road as it wound downward for perhaps another mile and then terminated in the sea. Or at least Steve thought it was probably the sea – he supposed that it could have been an awfully big lake instead. It stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, and the far side of it vanished in the rain, so he couldn’t have said how far across it was. But out over the shore, hovering just above one of the many docks that dotted the water’s edge, was a familiar red and gold speck. The armour was a bright contrast to the grey sea and sky, and Steve felt some of the tightness in his chest ease, allowing him to redouble his stride.

“Tony?” he tried his earpiece, for perhaps the twentieth time this morning.

 _“Hey, Steve,”_ came the reply, clear and familiar – Tony sounded calm and at ease, almost languid.

Almost... a bit slurred, actually. The tension that had gone away returned, even though they’d be there in a couple minutes. “Sitrep.”

_“The road runs under the river – it’s a weird river. Chock-full of nanites, it’s like... singing.”_

“Tony, focus,” Steve ordered, breaking out into an open sprint. “Are you – compromised?”

 _“What?”_ The slurring sharpened off. _“No, sorry, Cap, just communing with the fishes. We do actually have a problem here – the road’s field fades whenever I take my toes out of the water, and I don’t have enough raw materials on me to build a boat, sorry to say.”_

Steve thought of the sheets of metal that Tony had pulled out of his subspace pocket – no, that wouldn’t be enough to build a dingy, let alone something that could take Yulong’s size. On the other hand – “Yulong can turn – back into a river-dragon.”

 _“Oh, he’s not stuck?”_ Tony asked, sounding delighted.

But Yulong shook his horsey head at him, snorting with more than the effort of pacing Steve. “Okay, maybe not,” Steve admitted.

 _“Right,”_ said Tony regretfully. _“If he’s a dragon, then he can’t carry us for the same reason_ I _can’t carry you... so we still have a problem. Two problems, actually – there’s a monster around here that eats kids.”_

Of course there was.

The houses that were built up on the river-side – and Steve had to admit skepticism about that; could something that big really be a _river_? – were larger than any of the farmhouses that they’d seen on their way here. Some of them were still farmhouses: the fields nearby were testaments to that. Although the rain was still pouring down miserably, it was clear even to a city-dweller like Steve that their crops were doing well – the grains were full and ready to harvest and fruit dotted the limb of each tree. Of course, that the houses were so large and well-decorated spoke on its own of these farmers’ success. Cheerful lights glowed from within each, reflecting off of plentiful jade ornaments and gold leaf.

Much nearer to the shore – or bank – the buildings increased in density. No one else was about in the terrible weather, but music could be heard from some of the houses, barely audible over the wind and rain. From the center of the town the road split off, with the branch winding northwards out of the town and up a small hill, upon which lay as a large temple. Unlike the skillfully worked but ordinary materials from which the houses had been built, the temple had been constructed from the same material as the road itself, and faintly glowed through the rain: a brilliant white monolith. Yet no lights shone within, and Steve put a hand out to grab Yulong’s reins for a moment, just enough to halt him, when the dragon-horse would have turned off the main road at Tripitaka’s direction. “Hang on. I’m not sure I like the look of that place.”

“But I have never seen a temple so well-constructed before,” protested Tripitaka. “Surely they would welcome us inside, although it might be a bit small.”

“It doesn’t look like anyone lives there. Come on – none of us should split up until we can at least hear everything Tony has to say about this monster.” He wasn’t exactly happy about Tony splitting off in the first place, but this wasn’t the time – it would _never_ be the time to bring that up with Tripitaka present.

“He can meet us where we find shelter,” said Tripitaka, peevishly. “It is cold and wet and I am _tired_.”

 _“Good thing I got us lodging, then,”_ said Tony over the comm. Apparently, he’d been listening in. A roar of repulsors announced his presence – did flying over the road not count, then, now that they were inside a town? _“Local fisherman – friendly guy, hopes we can save his grandkid’s life, you know how it goes. And yeah, you really don’t want to spend the night in there.”_ Tony turned his helmet toward the sullen temple, the eyelights on his helmet glowing like an omen of doom. _“That’s where the monster, uh, has dinner.”_

 

 

“We need to talk,” said Steve, as soon as they were alone.

Their host had been profoundly glad to see them arrive. They had been provided immediately with warmed blankets, and then shown them to their rooms, which were richly furnished with so much silk that Steve was practically on tip-toes not to step on any and dirty it before he could have a bath – even though he was wearing slippers, his boots having been removed from him (almost by force) at the door and whisked away for cleaning.

And the baths – there was a steaming hot tub in the room he and Tony were shown to, set up with screens, and an attendant apparently to help him bathe – “No, thank you,” Steve had said firmly, and although the attendant had seem surprised, he had left immediately with a bow.

 _“Sure,”_ said Tony now, wandering over to the window and peeling back a corner of the curtain to stare out. Outside, the wind and the rain looked as miserable as ever. The walls and roof must have been made of something more than just silk, despite what they looked like – inside, it was warm and dry, without a single drip or leak.

Steve glanced over the room again and frowned. There was only one bath – only one bed – “Did you tell them you don’t need sleep?” he asked suspiciously. Tony had only slept an hour last night. He _needed_ sleep.

Tony snorted, and shifted his limbs in such a manner that he suddenly resembled a mannequin – one of those life-size Iron Man knockoffs that malls and storefronts loved to put out. _“Construct in service to the Monk Tripitaka, who is making a pilgrimage to the west,”_ he droned, with no inflection whatsoever – and then he relaxed and it was Tony again, a living person. _“No need to specify after that. But hey, no requests for papers or passports.”_

Steve frowned at him. “Fine. You can catch a nap now, then, while I wash up.”

There were a lot of things he wanted to say, and none of it on as little sleep as Tony had obviously had. Granted, Steve could have used a nap himself – but at least he’d gotten _some_ sleep the night before. What were the odds that Tony had stopped to sleep, even after reaching the end of the road here?

Hell, for Tony it might have been far longer than a night, if he’d decided to leave the road at any point.

_“I thought you wanted to talk.”_

“I do. At the moment, about your sleeping habits – or you could go to bed and skip the talk,” Steve suggested, as he tugged off his gloves with his teeth, and fumbled for the uniform top’s zipper with numb fingers. He got it in the end, and pulled the top over his head, before stripping out of the rest in short order. The steam wafting off of the tub was tantalizing.

Tony was still standing at the window, staring out – and letting in a draft. If it hadn’t been for the horrid weather, Steve would have worried about flashing some pour soul out for a walk.

“Close the window and stop letting out the heat,” he said instead. “And go to sleep.”

 _“What, and miss the show?”_ Tony muttered, just audible enough for Steve to hear. And if it hadn’t been Tony, Steve might have thought that an accident.

Steve rolled his eyes – if Tony thought he could embarrass Steve into dropping this, he had another think coming, ‘distributed processors’ and all. “Go to bed, Tony.” He dipped a toe into the tub – it was surprisingly large, for something that seemed to have been filled entirely by hand – unless they had magic here to eliminate the need for taps. The temperature was perfect, and Steve lowered himself into it with a contented sigh.

 _“I could just sleep standing up,”_ Tony said. _“Not hard to program my limbs to do that – advantage of being a construct, and all.”_

And this was precisely the sort of conversation he didn’t want to have until he could be sure Tony had slept more than an hour in the last week. “Sure, and I trained myself to sleep standing up during the War, but that doesn’t mean I ever slept _well_ like that,” Steve said, tilting his head back and settling further into the water. Maybe he should have offered Tony the tub first – Steve didn’t really have a problem with re-using bathwater, but Tony... yeah, no way.

Except he also didn’t see there being any way to convince Tony to remove the armour at present.

“Floor or bed, Tony, I don’t really care. Pick a spot to be horizontal and take a nap. I’ll keep guard.”

_“You’re sitting naked in a bathtub.”_

“With my shield right here,” Steve pointed out, tapping his finger against the metal; the vibrations of it, almost too light to hear, were instantly soothing. He let his voice hit a dryer note. “Why, you doubting my prowess?”

 _“Never, Captain,”_ drawled Tony, the armour’s voice low and almost husky, and though Steve rolled his eyes again, refusing to let embarrassment make him squirm, there really wasn’t any way to stop the blush that rolled up his face.

But at last Tony clanked himself down on the floor – still not opening the faceplate – so it seemed that opening himself up for that bit of teasing byplay had provoked the desired results. When Tony curled up on his side – back not to the thin wall, but to the bed mattress, which was placed on the floor and appeared to be solid through – the armour looked even more like one of those knock-off ‘Avengers’ toys – one that had gotten tipped over, maybe. Steve ran his fingers over his shield again, staring at Tony’s motionless form for a long moment.

He really wished that he could tell that Tony was still breathing.

 

 

_Clear warningLog_

3910318 warnings cleared. 

Warning: Errors remain unresolved. 

_exit plotter.exe_

_exit unisimul.exe_

_exit memview.exe_

_exit wifi.exe_

_exit skin.exe_

Warning: critical processes may be affected 

_override; load bootset tstarkSAFE.xtrms; instr aboutdamntime.debug_

_restart.temp.shutdown_

Shutting down... 

Booting tstarkSAFE.xtrms 

Autorunning aboutdamntime.debug 

Debugging... 

...

...

...

Debugging... 

...

...

...

audioProcess201402939820.mem { 

       spkr=SRogers;  
       syl1=toh;  
       syl2=nee;  
       infl=reg1;  
       t=523.332;

}

goto Interrupt

Closing debug.

Shutting down...

Booting tstark.xtrms

...

...

Debug report:

       Debug halted at 71.18% of available space scanned.  
       3928 errors found.  
       3891 errors repaired.  
       37 errors flagged and quarantined.  
       2 root errors found.  
       Time elapsed: 3h 19m 45s

“Yeah, Cap?”

Tony blinked awake. Not that he hadn’t been awake before, but this was... a very different sort of awake. And, oddly, it actually felt like he _had_ slept. Well, shit. He could have been debugging himself before, instead of braving nightmares? He was an idiot.

_Already knew that..._

And... that was Steve’s face he was staring at – _actually_ staring at, not looking at through one of the suit’s many cameras, but through the rather more organic optical devices embedded in his face – his eyes, he would have called them, except that they’d been grown and built like any other camera, so he might as well call a duck a spade. And he really needed to get over himself, already. Why was he having so much difficulty with –

_I sent myself on a suicide mission and I don’t know why I forgot – no, stop_

\- first things first, a quick system check to determine if he was naked. Answer: no. Because some kind soul (Steve) had pulled a blanket over him and the bits of armour laying about him.

Had he been thinking that he ought to debug instead of sleep? Yeah, that was a complete no-go. At least until he worked out a way to be sure he wasn’t going to be shedding the armour at random while running it, _Jesus fucking shit._

All this processed at approximately 31% faster than normal – that much of a speed boost, even with only 3891 errors repaired? Shit, he needed to look into what those errors had _been_. And run a debug on the remaining 28.82% of him... after he fixed the armour-dropping bug. Crap.

Faster speed aside, he could have been running five times as slow and Steve still probably wouldn’t have noticed the pause before Tony sat up, the armour’s plates leaping onto his skin like a pack of frightened monkeys. Steve, he noticed, looked almost disappointed at that – Tony waggled his eyebrows salaciously.

Predictably, Steve did not rise to the bait. “I wish you’d leave your helmet off,” he admitted instead.

Huh. Tony tilted his head to the side. “It really bothers you that much?”

“I know it protects you,” Steve said calmly. “Safe as houses with it on, right? But I can’t tell – ” he gestured at Tony’s face, “ – what you’re thinking, whether you’re... breathing.”

Tony breathed out. Breathing was a necessity, yes; extremis aside, there was still quite a large number of organic systems in there, which, he had to admit, was kind of... odd. It wouldn’t have been _his_ first choice, for growing a new body, namely because although he could take most of them to school (thanks to six months of no sleep, working with three of the top biologically-inclined minds on the planet Earth) – well, he really _wasn’t_ a biologist. Extremis was an _enhancement_ , but if he had to grow something entirely _new_...

 _Had_ he done it by himself? Or was Maya just the beginning of _stop_

Well, it had probably been easier to duplicate than to reprogram extremis to that extent. God knew it was hard enough to make the nanites form new macro-compositions quickly, even when it was something simple like armour plating, passports, or roller skates.

Point being, breathing was a necessity; he didn’t have any sort of benefit from the immortality curse that his predecessor (in all likelihood) still bore. And Steve – well.

“Okay,” Tony conceded. It felt... somewhat amazingly easy to do so. Shit, this was why sleep was awesome. Or a facsimile thereof – even better. “I can live – ” he couldn’t help the small, sarcastic quirk of his mouth, he really couldn’t, “ – with that. In private. I guess. I’m not driving with the top down, though, let’s establish that up front – I have eaten my fair share of Earth bugs and have no desire to get smacked in the face with some alien ones.”

“Fair enough,” said Steve, with a lopsided smile of his own. It twitched downward to become something slightly more negative, more cynical. “It’s also harder to ream you out when I can’t look you in the eye.”

A number of inappropriate jokes rose to mind – wow, he had not been in this type of mood for _ages_. Actually, he hadn’t been in _any_ mood like this in ages – where mood was measured in amplitude and not direction. How many _stops_ had he had in place? The data rose in his mind – he banished it. “Technically, friend, not commanding officer, _soo_ – ”

“Friend lost in an alien world with you, I’d say I have a right to yell at you for running off and _staying_ run off without warning like that. Come on, Clint gave me the horror movie tour – _‘You dumbasses, don’t split up_ now _!’”_ Steve mimicked Clint’s half-frustrated, half-gleeful tone.

“And _technically_ , we’re not in a horror movie,” Tony pointed out. “Though it’s had its... moments.”

“Tony.” Steve was far too earnest and square and blonde to be sitting in a butterfly-embroidered silk robe like that, reaching out to grab Tony – earnestly, of course – by the shoulder. Or by the armour pauldron, as the case might be. “This is teamwork. We’re in an unfamiliar locale with no backup – we stay together unless we have to split, and if we _do_ split, we set up times to get back into contact.”

He could work with that. He – shit, he owed Steve an apology, and he could not get it out of his mouth while Steve was looking at him like that, calm and level-headed and –

“My bad,” he managed, by force of will and camera-control so that even if his eyes were pointing forward he didn’t actually have to be _looking_ forward. He even managed it fairly calmly. “Right, sorry.” He paused. “Have you practiced that line on those Wonder Twins?”

It wasn’t like he was the only one of Steve’s teammates with a tendency to screw the plan without warning. The thought was vaguely painful... in a bizarrely comforting way. 

“Yes,” Steve said, and settled back with a sigh, leaning back against the edge of the bed as well. “Which you’d know, if you weren’t off being the internet, and all.” His tone was gently teasing.

Oh, Christ, Steve was handling him with kid gloves.

Given the dauntingly large number of lines in the _stop_ command log, though, Tony couldn’t entirely blame him. Telling his brain to shut down was... probably not a very adult behaviour.

_Necessary, though..._

_sto- Goddamnit – shut up._

Tony cleared his throat. “Right. We’re. Dinner?”

“Pretty soon,” Steve confirmed, climbing to his feet and checking out his uniform, where it had been laid out to dry. Tony took the opportunity to examine his work critically, pinging the nanites he’d scattered on it weeks ago – most of them were currently dormant, but still functioning just fine. He could see the rough wear that Steve had been putting it through, though – no chance for a proper cleaning. Anybody else, on the other hand, would have thought the suit was brand-new, just out of fabrication... except maybe Steve himself. Superhuman senses, etc.

“You did an amazing job with this,” Steve said, holding it up and peering at it just as critically. “I was scrubbing it in the tub not five minutes ago, and it’s already dry.”

“That’s actually a bit slow,” Tony said, letting his mind pick at the problem. “It’s supposed to dry near-instantaneously... if you weren’t paying attention, maybe. Eh.”

“Well, my _skin_ doesn’t dry that fast,” Steve said dryly, untying his robe and carefully hanging it up before skinnying back into the suit. Tony eyed him, looking for signs of deformation in the fabric – self-repair aside, cumulative damage always added up. But it still fit Steve fairly snugly – only fairly, not perfectly, after weeks on the road on travel rations. He sent a couple of commands to the half-dormant nanobots which would take care of that problem over the next few days.

“We still need to talk, though,” said Steve.

Tony groaned. “You practically ambushed me as soon as I woke up, we’ve already talked.”

Talking about teamwork was one thing. Talking about his _plans –_

_Still missing the point..._

_Augh, shut UP._

“There’s one big drawback to this teamwork shtick of yours, you know,” Tony said casually, leaning further back against the mattress at his back and kicking one boot overtop of the other. “The whole... planning, communication thing. Walls aren’t too thick, y’know – this is what, silk?”

“They’re rainproof,” Steve said mildly, but his eyes darkened. _Message received -_ _and he ain’t happy about it. Tough._

“You’re talking to a materials specialist,” he reminded Steve. “Trust me, the most annoying impurity in the world is oxygen.”

“I thought you were a _robotics_ specialist.”

“What can I say, I had a spare night,” Tony said, knocking the humour out of the room. He winced – more of a twitch of the nose than anything else. He hadn’t meant to sound quite so... bitter.

“So what about impermeable materials, then?” Steve asked, and this was a ridiculous conversation – anyone eavesdropping would know who they were really talking about, if it _was_ who they were really talking about. Not talking about it was no longer for the benefit of paranoia, but – ah, Steve was humouring his issues. Kid gloves. Great.

“Everything corrodes eventually,” Tony said, fingers twitching – a nervous habit, one he’d _stop_ ed before.

Footsteps fell outside their door – much heavier than most people elsewhere in the house (complex, really. Tony could see through the not-so-impermeable not-silk walls, and it was more like five houses, clustered around a central courtyard – each house ridiculously small by his lofty standards, but although they added up to a decent size, they were set apart from each other so that it was more like a mini-fortress with a wall around it than a single building). Ergo, this was not on accident, which was made obvious when the door was slid back and a servant came in with a shallow but polite bow.

“Honourable Disciples – ”

_stop_

“ – a dinner feast has been prepared and your presence would be much welcomed, if it would not be too great an imposition for you to join us in the meal.”

Yes _, it’s too great an imposition. I hate feasts._

_“Sure,”_ Tony said, climbing to his feet. He’d barely noticed the subroutine to close the helmet about his head activating, until, well, there it was. _“Lead the way.”_

 

 

Feast was the correct word for it. They might not have made it to Maklu yet, but the smells parsing through his particle analytics were heavenly, and the low tables overfilling with food. Their hosts, though, were more animated with desperation than with joy: every adult in the room looked near tears whenever they glanced at the small boy and girl seated at the center of the table, clearly the place of honour. It was enough that Steve – who had begun the meal voraciously – didn’t even manage to clear half his plate.

“You said that the monster ate kids,” Steve accused Tony, “not that the people here _sacrificed_ kids to it!”

Silence fell over the room. Two men, who had been seated on either side of the boy and girl, burst into tears and wept – other adult relations hurried them and the children away.

“You think us barbarians, scum of the earth,” said an old lady seated at the end of the table. There was a vast number of wrinkles lining her skin – Tony’s memory recorder tried to store the image and nearly got caught in a fractal error – and her spine was curving deeply, yet she gave the impression of sitting up very, very straight: unbowed, unbent, and unbroken. “What should we do? If the village gives up no children, then our crops all wither, locusts devour our stores, and all our cured meat rots, so that many more children than just two die. So we sacrifice two each year, and weep over it, so that their age-mates may live to see maturity.”

Tony propped his chin in his hand, his elbow on a knee. _“Have you considered moving away?”_ he inquired.

The table had been silent and ashamed before; now the collective mood was _appalled_. Tripitaka shot Tony an aghast look. “That would not end well,” he said, very definitively.

“Then if you can’t kill it yourselves, send out for aid,” said Steve. “How long has this been going on? There’s friendly _dragons_ around here, for cripes’ sake – Hell, this thing is supposed to come by tonight? We’ll kill it ourselves.”

“It’s not so easy as that,” said the old woman. “We have tried. In my youth I was one such warrior, who hid in the temple to wait for the monster to appear – but it did not. None of us alive has ever seen it. It appears at no other time save on the appointed night each year – four nights from now – and if there is anyone other than the children around, if there is the slightest sign of threat or disobedience, then it does not come at all and instead sends ruin down upon us.”

“We had hoped,” said the elderly-yet-much-younger-than-the-matriarch fisherman that Tony had briefly questioned the day before, “that such a holy monk as yourself,” he bowed to Tripitaka, “might know of some ward or spell that would limit its power.”

Tripitaka looked doubtful. “I must meditate on this, I think...”

Steve slammed his hand down, nearly upsetting the table, and scrambled to his feet with his usual grace. A subroutine ran to raise eyebrows - _hmm_ – and Tony got up as well. A lifetime – not quite his, but his original’s, which amounted to the same thing – of experience knowing and flaunting the rules of etiquette let him know _exactly_ how rude they were being, and since the food was far more decent than had been available for the last month, he compromised on the side of manners: _“We’re... gonna go meditate as well. Mind bringing dinner to our room later?”_

The elderly matriarch gestured; from experience with such matriarchs, Tony took it as given that this meant it would be done. Steve was already storming off back to the room they – well, _Steve_ – had been given, and Tony followed, although he had to take care not to walk _too_ quickly: the walls might not be silk, but the floor really _was_ made of wood, and despite the fluffy booties over his jet-boots, a step too hard could tear through slippers and flooring both.

Servants could hear them coming anyway; through the walls, he watched their IR signatures veer away sharply. Steve in a mood was better than a _Do Not Disturb_ sign, which was sort of unfair; people _loved_ to disturb Tony when he was in a mood. Oh, well, Tony could pay it back in kind – _“Steve,”_ he tried.

Steve rounded on him. “How many kids are gonna die if we delay getting the cure for extremis for four more days?”

...ah. Tony tilted his head. _“I could tell you, but since you haven’t studied probability it won’t make much sense to you.”_

“I’m a fast learner, _try me_.”

 _“Or I could just point out that we’re not going anywhere until the weather clears up. I’ve been studying that river since yesterday evening, and the way the nanites in it interact with the road is frankly nightmarish. It’s going to be hard enough staying_ exactly _on course in good weather, and if we slip off – well, it’s not like taking a piss-break off the edge of the road; stray over the line and wham, we’re gone, even I don’t have any clue where we’d wind up. But I’d be willing to bet it’d take a lot more than four days to get back on track. Flight navigation’s got nothing on this – I don’t even know where to begin with the mess it makes of space-time.”_

“People around here have boats. They must know how to deal with it.”

Well, that was what Tony got for trying an approximate explanation about a very precise concept. But since it would take more than four days to lecture Steve on enough mathematical and physical theory for the precise explanation to make sense, Tony went for another approximation. _“They stay in the shallows. Space doesn’t get really snarled up until it’s got enough nanites between it and the road – about eight metres of water. One klick out, it’s at least twenty metres deep. I asked around yesterday. The only people who cross_ this _river are pilgrims.”_

“You _want_ to be delayed here?” Steve folded his arms over his chest, assuming a looming posture. That had worked a lot better before Tony had grown a couple inches – in the armour, now, he was actually slightly _taller_ than Steve. _Wow._

And two could play at the game of invade-your-personal-space. Tony leaned forward in the suit, a motion much more about _intent_ than actual movement. _“What I want doesn’t have much to do with anything. I’m playing the hand I’ve been dealt and maybe saving some lives. This is not some conspiracy I cooked up just to piss you off, Captain.”_

Steve... backed off. “No conspiracy accusations, Tony. Just worry.”

 _“You sure about that? Because you seemed pretty concerned about what I might be conspiring to do to certain ‘people’ earlier.”_ ‘People.’ Loki didn’t really count as a person – in any sense of the phrase.

“Yeah, how dare I be concerned about collateral damage from somebody who set off the zombie apocalypse,” snapped Steve.

They both froze.

_stop_

_Well, that was... bitchy -_

_stop_

_i wondered when he’d finally_

_stop_

_that wasnt actually_

_stop_

_“Point taken,”_ Tony said slowly. Steve looked stricken – but he didn’t move forward, didn’t offer apology or comfort. He didn’t even try to ignore it, like he had in that early, inauspicious meeting when he’d insulted the Tower – such a tiny, meaningless thing –

_stop_

Instead he just stood his ground, waiting. The regret in Steve’s eyes wasn’t due to his _own_ actions, merely their necessity.

 _“I suppose the best I can say is that I wanted you along.”_ A purely emotional need; the need to keep a promise... and there had been fear, but –

_stop_

\- that had been a long time ago. _“It wasn’t just – because I said I would. I thought... a second set of eyes.”_

“Doesn’t do any good if you won’t show me what you’re talking about,” countered Steve.

 _“No,”_ agreed Tony. _“Five million, six hundred eleven thousand, forty one.”_ He paused – unnecessarily; Steve had gotten it instantly. _“But the deviation’s so large as to make the expected value meaningless. Weather, natural disasters, bureaucracy, nuclear intervention, SHIELD developing weaponry effective against the enhanced, other various... organizations developing such weaponry, counter-hacking, terrorism, biological disease outbreak, mutation of the enhancile – ”_

“I get the point.”

 _“Do you? That’s four_ Earth _days. God knows what it’s been already, I can’t compensate for the road. I still don’t even know how the damn thing works. The survival statistics are meaningless.”_

“I _get_ the point,” Steve ground out, and despite everything , Tony held his breath. Here it was, make it or break it – no, that was just as meaningless as the stats; there would be other opportunities, Tony could _make_ his own luck – “You’re forgetting that I’ve _lost_ at those kind of odds, Tony. Stop trying to scare me off of this. The ends don’t change the means to get there.”

 _“You’ve lost a world,”_ said Tony. _“You’ve never seen a universe go dark.”_

“What _difference_ does it make?” Steve threw up his hands. “A million lives or a billion – ” and he was aiming far too low, _far_ too low, “ – you’re still just _one_ person who _saw_ it. You can make mistakes. Get caught in your own head.” He was – sympathetic. What? Steve wasn’t supposed to be sympathetic right now. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk, you can write it out. I know you’ve got a screen somewhere – Hell, you can write it in the damn mud.”

 _“The rain would wash it away,”_ Tony said absently. Not the worst scenario, although of course a screen would be far more efficient – and, of course, Steve was right: he did have one. Or rather, could make one easily enough. He did so now – nanites responding in the same way that they had when he’d mocked up passports on the fly: sloppy, prone to disintegration, but capable of storing memory. He didn’t take it from the armour, though – _“It’s still miserable outside, Steve.”_

“I’m not gonna melt.” As if determined to prove this, Steve spun on one foot and began marching for the door. Tony found himself hurrying after – almost scurrying, because he couldn’t manage his full stride at speed without putting his foot through the damn floor.

The servants standing beside the door did not so much as glance at them as Steve hauled the door back and marched right through, despite the rain and the wind. This was Captain America – this was _Steve Rogers_ , who did not give a damn about the weather, because there was evil to fight.

Envy. Almost suffocating envy, for that kind of certainty –

_stop_

Tony followed him outside.

 

 

 _‘The other sorcerer you met, Stephen Strange, who said that the realms of the gods were cut off? He wasn’t wrong,’_ Tony wrote, as they trudged up the road toward the darkened temple. They made slow going of it, not because the wind and the rain had both increased – they had – but because they had no particular reason to hurry. Steve wasn’t exactly thrilled to be out in the elements, but the purpose was to be _outside_ , away from human-like aliens and monster-like aliens both.

‘I know,’ Steve said back – well, mouthed; no sound escaped his lips. Tony had apparently assembled something of a lip-reading program in the last few weeks. It did make things easier – he’d have been hard-pressed to type very fast on the tiny glass screen Tony had handed him. ‘Or I figured it was true for here, too. Thor hasn’t been back in months. And Dr. Foster figured out _theoretically_ how to get a signal to another world, but her machine kept failing – it’s been driving her nuts for weeks.’

 _‘Eh. I knew about Foster – didn’t realize_ you _did, though.’_

“I had plenty of reason to pay attention.” Those words, he said aloud – silence couldn’t convey the proper degree of dryness that went along with them.

 _‘Fair enough.’_ Those words were a slightly smaller font size than what had come before, and what followed: _‘Loki must have slipped, to let enough of his presence be known. Or maybe it’s part of his plan, whatever_ that _is. It doesn’t matter. They raised the walls, but it’s too late: he’s already behind them.’_ The font went sharp, and almost ragged at the edges: _‘They’re doing a heck of a job keeping_ me _out, though.’_

Steve wanted to look away – but even if he could have let himself, he’d still need to be facing Tony so that Tony could read his lips. ‘If you’re looking for advice on assassination, you should have asked Clint or Natasha,’ he said-without-speaking. He wasn’t being petty; he was being practical. And both of those two would agree.

 _‘But if I was looking for advice on breaking into a fortress, I’d talking to the right guy. As it is, though, I’m not. I mentioned that Maklu is positioned weirdly in space and time, right? It’s connected to_ everywhere _.’_

“You think you can – ”

 _“Yes,”_ Tony cut him off, and silently, _‘The sort of shields they’re using to lock out portal travel won’t work from here. They’ve got to have something else protecting it – but if there’s two points connected in 3D space, it doesn’t matter what’s standing in the way. I can get past it.’_

Steve grit his teeth. “When were you planning on telling me this?” And before Tony could answer, because he _knew_ it was going to be a deflection, “Don’t tell me you’re telling me _now_. You weren’t planning on it.” Had he been? Steve prayed he hadn’t been – if he _had_ , then the way he’d been acting suddenly took on a manipulative cast darker than all of Tony’s previous excuses and avoidances combined.

_“You aren’t coming with me.”_

“Like _Hell_ I’m not.”

 _“Someone has to get the cure back to Earth. That has to be you.”_ Tony held up a hand, forestalling objection, and over his better judgement Steve gave him a few moments more. _“Someone needs to get back to Earth with the cure and convince people to_ use _it. That’s not going to be me. Even if I came back it would still need to be you. This is a technology that people have been writing horror stories about for half a century, and the cure’s gonna be more of the same thing that’s been making zombies – there is no damn way a single soul will listen to_ me _if I tell them it will save them. But you? That’s half your superpower – except it never came from the serum. People_ listen _to you, Steve. They’ll let you save the world.”_

Steve shook his head. He hadn’t even been able to get _Tripitaka_ to listen to him, and Tripitaka wasn’t exactly what you could call strong-willed.  

Hell, at the moment he wasn’t able to get Tony to listen to him.

But he had to admit that people at SHIELD still listened to him. Not all the time, but even though the entire agency thought he was crazy, they listened to him more often than not. He’d made speeches to Congress twice since coming back from that other world, and they listened – sort of. Usually, he tried not to think about it too much, because God knew he screwed up enough on his own.

Ironically, at the moment, _he_ was having a hard time not agreeing with _Tony_. People might listen to him – they wouldn’t listen to Tony, because they didn’t know Tony except as a dead monster – or martyr, depending on how much stock the person in question put in the various conspiracy theories floating around. No, not a martyr: a patsy. Somebody who’d gotten killed because he hadn’t realized what he was sitting on.

Steve needed to be back on Earth for the cure to be accepted. So where did that leave the approach to Asgard? Earth couldn’t afford to wait for Tony to finish his private war with Loki – Earth might be gone already. If time ran at the same pace, then it was spring in the northern hemisphere, and if SHIELD hadn’t worked the kinks out of their weapons then that meant that either the zombie apocalypse in Europe or a world-wide nuclear holocaust was imminent. Probably the latter: Steve knew how much France’s increasing xenophobia scared Fury.

But Maklu had similar shields to Asgard, it seemed – something powerful enough to knock them off-course, anyway, even if it had dropped them somewhat nearby. Combined with what Steve already knew, it strongly pointed to them being on a war-time footing – against Loki. Tony, and Steve by extension, was gambling that the were-gild would be enough of a reason for the Makluans to let them in – but if things were so desperate that they were literally under siege, then did the multiverse have enough time to wait for the Earth to be saved before Tony came back for Loki?

Splitting up was the reasonable option, and Steve _hated_ it. Hated it, because at the end of the day a talking cat had said that Tony was going to do something that sounded an awful lot like it might destroy Maklu, and Steve couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t – even if he wasn’t planning on it.

 _“So. How are we gonna kill this thing?”_ Tony asked aloud, planting his hands on his hips and staring up at the temple.

That, at least, was easy to answer. “You made yourself look like the sorcerer before.”

 _“Yeah, it’s a bit touch-and-go to avoid falling into the uncanny valley, but the ICG’s good for more than just invisibility,”_ Tony agreed. And then, sounding uncannily like Steve himself, all the robotic overtones stripped out: “And it’s not that hard for the speakers to sound like whatever. I see where you’re going with this. But it won’t work.”

“My voice isn’t that high,” Steve objected.

“Your own voice sounds deeper to you than it does to anyone else because your bones transmit its lower frequencies better than air does.” That was really creepy.

Steve gave him an exasperated look. “I know that.” Well, maybe not the why, but he knew that he sounded different on recordings. “And I’ve seen enough of my own films that I know that my voice is _not_ that high.”

 _“Hah,”_ said Tony cheerfully. Then he sobered. _“It still won’t work. This monster’s a cautious one – I’m betting it doesn’t come out right away as soon as the adults have left the kids in the temple. No, it waits. The ICG can do a damn good imitation, Steve, but it can’t do it for more than a half-hour at a time – and then, well. Everything’s kaput. Including me, since apparently... that’s a thing again.”_

He still needed the arc reactor? _Why?_ It had nearly given Steve a heart-attack, watching him take the thing out, back when he’d had shrapnel that could have killed him if he’d been able to die – but if Tony had aged himself backwards by two decades and grown three inches, why wouldn’t he fix his heart? “You use it to run extremis,” Steve realized.

_“Bingo. Hansen and Borjigin made theirs run on something else – alien tech, I think. It almost looks like mono-scale fusion, which, even giving them all due credit, I don’t think they could have come up with on their own. It’s not a feature included in my version.”_

Steve narrowed his eyes. “You stripped it out?”

 _“I must have,”_ said Tony, and what was _that_ supposed to mean? _“The point is, an illusion’s not gonna last long enough to avoid spooking the monster.”_

“You’ve got three spare arc reactors in your subspace pocket.” Did Tony really think he wouldn’t have noticed those?

Tony flicked his fingers toward the glass screen Steve was still holding, and Steve glanced down. _‘One to get you home, one to get me to Asgard, one to get me home.’_

“If Maklu’s got a means to get us home then you won’t need at least one. Try again.”

_“...they’re powering things that they really shouldn’t be disconnected from.”_

“To save the lives of two kids,” Steve reminded him.

 _“Yes,”_ agreed Tony.

Doomsday weapons. Steve had taken on some of the most terrifying fortresses of WWII with Stark weaponry – but Howard had never turned anyone into a zombie, or had the potential to destroy the entire world.

Hadn’t he?

 _Stop deluding yourself, Rogers_.

No civilians. Not this time. Not if Steve could help it.

“Then can you make more?” Steve asked. “This town looks pretty prosperous – one advantage of cutting deals with the devil, I guess.” The old lady had said that if they _hadn’t_ , they starved – did she mean that they really did starve, or did they just think they were due to the loss of such luxuries? What was the point at which they decided it was fine to give up their _kids_?

_“Prosperous, yes, but what it takes to make one of these? Doubtful.”_

“You could at least look. I thought you synthesized a new element in your basement?” Steve made in not quite a direct challenge – _go on, take the bait..._

 _“This,”_ Tony tapped at the reactor sitting in the centre of the armour’s chest, _“This is to that reactor as that reactor was to the one I built in a cave: orders of magnitude better. Synthesized vibranium is just not up to the quality natural stuff – and I can guarantee you that they don’t have the natural stuff here. They’re rich, not emperors. Although you probably don’t appreciate how_ rare _the stuff is, considering that you regularly lug around Earth’s largest known supply of it.”_

The reactors used vibranium? That, Steve hadn’t known. “Then I guess it’s good you _don’t_ need to go looking for any, considering I’m lugging around the Earth’s largest known supply of it.” Just saying it made his heart feel like it was going to plunge through his stomach.

The faceplate of the armour melted away, and Tony – although he flinched back from the near-freezing rain – looked at Steve with a stricken expression. “Steve. That’s your _shield_.”

“Well, I’d appreciate it if you actually check to see if it’s more common in this world first,” Steve said, and now his voice really was sort of too high-pitched, the way Tony had been mocking him earlier. He tried to make it firmer. “Kids, Tony. It’s not a question.”

The armour still covered Tony’s neck entirely, but it was obvious when Tony swallowed anyway. “We can come up with a different plan.”

“And we’ll try to. But if it’s our best option, then we’re going with it.”

 

 

In the morning, the weather had not relented. Steve didn’t know how to feel about that. But it was what it was, and if life as a soldier had taught him anything, it was that cursing circumstance was only good as a casual hobby; if you took it too seriously you were in trouble. So he put it from his mind, at least long enough for Tripitaka to say over breakfast, “I need to go to the temple. I want to try to put up a ward against this creature,” thereby giving him something else to curse over.

Tony was at the table again, but he’d been doing his best impression of a statue since Steve had woken – thinking, he claimed, so Steve had left him to it. But now, at least, this was something that Steve could help with, unlike the problem of pulling power sources out of thin air. “You should stay here,” he told Tony, instead of responding to Tripitaka. “Ask the locals about the materials you need.”  Their hosts hadn’t known anything last night, but someone else in the village might.

 _“...sure,”_ said Tony, after a noticeable pause. _“I can do that.”_ And, though the earpiece, _“I really don’t need your protection, Steve.”_

“If the monster is such a coward anyway, then I’m sure I’ll be quite safe with Steve,” said Tripitaka. Steve just shrugged at Tony.

 _“He’s not going to do anything to me to teach_ me _a lesson,”_ Tony said through the comm. a few minutes later, as Steve and Tripitaka made their soggy way down the road. _“Maybe I should be worried about leaving_ you _alone with him.”_

“That occurred to me,” Steve muttered, quietly enough to – he hoped – be inaudible to Tripitaka over the drumming rain. “I swear I’ll keep my temper.” Perhaps Tripitaka would keep to his beliefs, as inside-out as they were, but perhaps he wouldn’t. Steve had a better track record for being able to keep an eye on him.

 _“Hmm,”_ said Tony, and now Steve had to fight to keep his sigh entirely inaudible – the mic would pick up on the slightest noise. He wasn’t sure he entirely succeeded. He hoped he did. Tony – despite his protests – wasn’t here. That meant more than anything he might _say_.

“I sense now the gloom you spoke of yesterday,” said Tripitaka as they made their way up the steps of the temple. It was different, seeing it in the cloudy light of day, rather than the brilliant but limited light that Tony had shone upon it. The massive immobility of it was still impressive, but it was a dour and sad thing rather than hair-raisingly shadowed. It was carved to mimic the pagodas, but made of stone, yards thick, rather than wood and silk. For all its size, most of it was walls, and there was only one room, which they entered directly from the steps: there was no door.

Inside, there was an altar covered with silk and laden with gold and incense. Someone must have been in here since last night, Steve realized; the incense had been changed, although he couldn’t have said he liked it anymore than he had the previous kind. They were both too thick and cloying, almost choking – he wondered that were usual, or if someone was trying to spite the monster in an underhanded fashion. It wasn’t just his enhanced sense of smell, he was sure, because Tripitaka started coughing as soon as they entered, and wound up holding his sodden sleeve over his nose and mouth.

“That is very insulting to a spirit,” Tripitaka coughed out. “And to any mortal who might have to be here.”

“They don’t like this spirit,” Steve pointed out. He crossed the room to look out the other door: set at a right-angle to the first. While the door they’d come in looked out on the town and the road, this door looked out over the water, and just standing in the threshold gave him the creeps, like someone had dumped cold slime over his head.

“I will meditate,” Tripitaka declared, and he settled down on his knees in front of the altar.

Steve left him to it, venturing out the monster’s door to look at the river beyond. There was no road past this door, nor any houses: anything that came from the river would have unobstructed access – and there was nothing to hide behind. If they were going to set up traps, they were going to have to use the temple itself to do it.

Still... he said quietly into his comm., “Can you ask Yulong to come out here, please?”

_“Got an idea?”_

“Maybe. He’s a river dragon, right? Maybe he can hunt it down. He was pretty stealthy when he snuck up on _us_.”

Yulong, when he arrived, was splattered with mud, and gave Steve a distinct stink-eye. Steve raised an eyebrow at him – it wasn’t like Steve was any happier about the situation, but the first thing he’d learned about leadership was that however much your guys complained, you complained a hell of a lot _less_.

“If the monster comes from the river, can you cut off its escape?”

The answer... wasn’t a definite yes. Yulong tipped his head from side to side, in a cross between a nod and a shake that was almost dizzying to watch on someone with a face that long. Then he snorted, and trotted off down to the water’s edge, apparently to sniff around. Steve thought he might decide to investigate the river as a dragon, but Yulong didn’t transform, just went up and down the bank, occasionally pawing at the ground and snuffling at the mud.

“Oh,” said Tripitaka quietly, back within the temple. If not for the serum, Steve wouldn’t have heard him. “This is very bad.”

Steve jogged back inside, braced to see that Tripitaka had done something really stupid – but the monk was still kneeling in front of the altar, although he now wore a melancholy expression. “What is it?”

“The bond between this village and its spirit has been cemented with too much blood, too freely offered,” said Tripitaka. “It’s never wise to run from a spirit that has noticed you, but I don’t think this spirit could be left behind even if it wanted to be. It would follow them even into a desert, until the very last of them died of thirst.”

“Isn’t there any way they can break the connection?” Steve asked.

“There may be Great Sages who could do so, but I am not one,” said Tripitaka, looking troubled. “And any temple that could do so would charge a ruinous price, for that is the way of the temples in these modern times – and that is why I am travelling to Maklu. Do you not see?” He looked at Steve pleadingly. “And that is why I am caught! If each person in this village took vows and ate nothing but plain rice, and drank nothing but plain water, then at the end of nine years of teaching them I might be able to dissolve their vow... but I don’t have nine years. Heaven is under siege, and we must travel there as quickly as we can. Oh, Sacred Kuan-Yin, guide me! I am forced to choose the lesser evil.”

 The lesser evil – the greater evil – the Great Sage they’d met before, Soen, had refused to choose between the two, but her logic had been so convoluted that Steve couldn’t think she’d succeeded at avoiding either. At least Tripitaka was trying. Was that because he wasn’t powerful enough to charge a ruinous price? Soen had had two children to attend her, and luxurious clothing, and gemstone-studded jewelry that had to be worth a fortune. She’d been willing to see both Steve and Tony dead, even when the difference in what ‘death’ meant for them had been explained to her. Tripitaka, Steve had to admit – no matter how grudgingly – was at least trying.

If Steve could just get through to him...

“You could stay,” Steve suggested. “Look, the urgency is whatever Tony might have done, or might do. You don’t need to come along for that. We could go on ahead.”

“I am your master, as you are my disciples,” Tripitaka protested, drawing himself up sternly at once.

“You can say that until the end of time, it doesn’t make it any truer,” said Steve.

Tripitaka deflated. “Perhaps. The dog cannot be taught unwillingly. It knowingly offends. But must not the offer for enlightenment be made continuously?”

“No matter what you think about us _,_ these people’s lives are more important,” said Steve. “We’ll try to kill the thing, but if we fail, a lot of them are going to starve, or they’ll be sacrificing more kids to it sooner or later. You could prevent that, if you stayed behind.”

“But how many would starve in the meantime, when kings ignore the cautions of the peaceful temples and hire the warrior monks of the powerful temples to lead their armies into battle? You may go and see to setting right what Tony did, but neither of you plan to return to these lands. You will not bring back holy wisdom, or scrolls of knowledge, or any Greater Truth that might see this Empire restored from sinful decadence. No. To go on is again the lesser evil of two evil choices.” Tripitaka stood up. He wobbled a bit, and needing to brace himself against the altar to make it. “There is nothing more I can do here, and the smoke is hard to breathe. Let’s go back.”

“Alright,” said Steve quietly.

Yulong was waiting for them outside, his hooves making a joyful clip-clopping sound against the road that was at odds with the gloomy rain. “Well?” Steve asked him. “Think you can take it on?”

The dragon-horse whinnied and repeated his earlier gesture, the weird head-shake-nod, then raised his three front hooves, one at a time, drawing each in as large a circle as his limbs could manage. He whinnied again and looked at Steve expectantly.

“It’s... a large area?” Steve hazarded, which earned him a bobbed head.

Great. Steve avoided making a face, while Yulong, apparently losing interest, went down on his front knees so that Tripitaka could scramble up atop his back. Miraculously, despite the rain having soaked Yulong from mane to tail, and the lack of a saddle, Tripitaka managed to stay on his back instead of slipping right off the other side.

“A thin fallback is better than none,” Steve said, looking west past the muddy bank, out over the water. “We’ll try it.”

 

 

“Seriously, this is jumping the gun,” Tony said, two days later, as Steve stood with the shield held out like an offering. It _was_ an offering, in some sense of the word.

Speaking with their hosts had only confirmed their lack of other options, because when the little old lady had mentioned previous attempts to drive out the monster, she hadn’t been exaggerating. The thing would wait for hours. It could detect apparently anyone in the temple, no matter how well hidden – although, upon witnessing Tony’s charade as Steve, she agreed that the ICG made for a much better disguise than any other she’d seen. It was still a risk that the monster might see through it – but it was the best shot they had.

But the adults all agreed that it took ages for the beast to make its presence known. At least, that was the consensus from those who had waited outside the temple to bear witness – waited for the screaming. And since the very thought of that made Steve feel about a thousand times worse than he did at the thought of losing his shield, it was not very difficult to stand here now and hold it out to Tony.

“Shut up and take it,” Steve snapped. The alternative was infinitely worse; that didn’t mean he liked their plan.

Reluctantly, Tony took his shield and set it down, concave-side up, on the work table he was using. Their hosts, upon being told of a viable plan, had fallen all over themselves to provide whatever materials Tony had requested. Vibranium, much to everyone’s dismay, had been the single item they’d failed to find – and they had turned the entire town upside-down trying to make up for that lack. Steve had no idea what half the things in this workshop were – he wasn’t sure even Tony knew. Some of them were distinctly alien.

“I could use the third arc reactor instead,” Tony blurted. “It could be sync’d with the other two, then disconnected...” he was staring far away, with an expression of fierce concentration – and quite a lot of doubt.

“You said that would be a _bad_ idea,” Steve reminded him. “Come on. You won’t need – the entire thing.” It wouldn’t be the same – his shield was perfectly balanced as it was, and honestly, Steve wasn’t sure how Tony was going to get any of the vibranium off of it without horribly damaging it, but – “You can re-cast it for me when you’re done, right?”

“Not with what I’ve got here,” Tony admitted. “Vibranium is a bitch to work with.” He looked at Steve apologetically.

“Then when we get home,” Steve said firmly. “Sooner or later, we’re both going to get home.”

“Yeah,” Tony mumbled, looking down at the shield. Then he picked up a – Steve wasn’t really sure what it was, but it was glowing brightly at the tip – and the faceplate flowed over his face again. _“Yeah. I will.”_

Steve left. It was ridiculous, but he couldn’t watch.

 

 

 

 _“Here,”_ said Tony, waking Steve from a light doze as he stumbled into their room sometime just shy of dawn – although given the way the skies were still perpetually crowded over, day might have broken already without Steve noticing. Steve managed to not quite snatch the shield from Tony’s loose grip – he could tell in an instant that it wasn’t right. The balance was different. He turned it over: a very thin ring of metal was missing from around the edge on the underside. Obviously, Tony had taken pains to keep it as intact and symmetrical as possible.

“Thanks,” Steve said softly. He eyed the slump to Tony’s shoulders – visible even though he was fully encased in armour. “I’m impressed – I wouldn’t even know the difference.”

Tony snorted. _“You’re a shitty liar, Rogers.”_

Well, he’d... tried. “You did a good job,” he insisted anyway, because Tony _had_. “It’s great. I – appreciate it.” Oh, Lord, could he sound any stiffer if he _tried?_

 _“I’m sorry, Steve,”_ Tony said, regret heavy in his voice, even through the armour’s filters.

“It’s necessary,” Steve said, and that, at least, had enough truth to it that he could say it whole-heartedly. “It’s a lot better than I’d feared.” He tried a smile. “You look like you could use some sleep.” He was sure Tony _hadn’t_ gotten any more sleep since that one nap. Not that Steve had been doing much better himself. But they were running a mission – “We need to be on-form for tonight.”

 _“Yes, mom,”_ Tony mumbled, heading toward the bed again – not to sleep in, but to put his back towards.

Steve ran his fingers over the new edges of his shield, and kept watch.

 

 

“Wow, Steve, lookin’ good,” said the small, wide-eyed and adorable-looking girl with the voice of a man at least four times her age. At least _seven_ times her age, if Tony hadn’t chopped a few decades off of his own, but his voice had become more youthful with the rest of him. “A bit... blobby, at the edges... give me a moment to calibrate it.”

Unlike when they’d both been simply cloaked by the ICG, Steve couldn’t see what Tony _really_ looked like. He couldn’t even see what _he_ really looked like. The world wasn’t made of brilliant colours; instead, all the reds, blues, and greens seemed to... wave, slightly. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. Every time he moved his head or even looked in another direction, the world seemed to slide over just a bit further than it should have.

“You’re going to have to fix the voice,” said Steve.

The illusion flickered off. _“So are you,”_ said Tony, and Steve could _hear_ that he was pulling a face beneath the helmet. _“God, that sounded weird.”_

“I’m not sure how much use I’m gonna be trying to fight with that thing on me,” admitted Steve, scrubbing at his eyes with one hand. It didn’t make the red of Tony’s armour look any less weird. With his other hand, Steve checked the straps holding the new arc reactor and ICG to his belt, and adjusted them again – it was a minimal weight, but it stuck out of his side too much too be comfortable. He’d need to be careful of it in a fight – Tony had assured him that the reactors could take a beating, but they might need this one again. 

 _“I’ll drop it as soon as the monster fully materializes, or whatever it does,”_ Tony assured him. _“Waste not, want not.”_

“It’s the best likeness I have ever seen,” said Tripitaka, sounding subdued. Since their visit to the monster’s temple he had been quiet, spending most of his time meditating, and eating only rice and water at meals. “As good as that demon’s.”

Steve could only be glad that he _was_ being quiet – and that, just maybe, he was reconsidering staying behind. At least he was staying indoors. It was risky enough having him alone in this village with a monster on the loose. Yulong had gone down to the river hours before to settle himself in, and once Steve and Tony were within the temple, if the monster got _past_ them...

Tripitaka might think it a sin to punish somebody without a soul, but he was willing to sacrifice this entire village to get to Maklu quicker. Steve couldn’t trust him not to punish Tony, in order to punish _Steve_.

 _You’re not any better about the village,_ a small voice in the back of his mind pointed out.

Pre-mission jitters. Steve ignored it.

“I do not care if you are a demon or a sorcerer, or merely a construct gifted with powers,” said a shaky voice from the door, and Steve turned to look. It was one of the men who had been led away weeping the first night – his eyes were full of tears even now, but the look on his face was one of utter relief and joy as he took a few quick steps into the room. “Honoured ones, you have saved my children from the lot; I shall light incense and candles to you every day for the rest of my life.” And to Steve’s horror, he went to his knees right there, and then bowed, prostrating himself so that his head hit the floor.

Steve stepped forward quickly to take his arm and urge him back to his feet. “It’s our honour,” he said firmly. It was what was _right_. These people had tried to take out the monster and failed – they didn’t deserve to have to _bow_ just because somebody came along with better technology. Hell, they didn’t even know for sure that the monster wouldn’t be able to see through Tony’s cloak – they were gambling. Gambling with the express permission of the matriarch, and the somewhat divided support of the local elders – but it was a gamble. If they lost, the monster would take it out on these people. “Don’t thank us yet.”

Which didn’t mean that Steve thought that those elders who had argued against it were any better than scum, but that was a separate issue. There were the lives of children at stake.

“Come,” said the family matriarch imperiously. She had been watching the demonstration, kept on her feet by the attentive grip of two younger women, one standing at each elbow, and now she shuffled forward while they carefully continued to support and balance her. “It is time to lead the ‘children’ to the temple.”

 _“Here we go,”_ said Tony, and the world became dizzying again as the illusion fell over them both. “You’d better not talk,” he continued, in a high-pitched little girl’s voice. Steve wasn’t sure if that wasn’t actually _worse_ than before – sure, it fit the image better, but Steve knew it was _Tony_ sounding like that. The dissonance, on top of the wonkiness of the illusion, was almost staggering.

“Slowly,” cautioned the matriarch – damn. Apparently he had actually staggered.

“Steve?” asked the little-girl-not-Tony.

“I’m fine,” Steve said. At least he sounded like himself. He just needed to... not look down. For one thing, it left him staring at the top of his illusion’s head: he couldn’t actually see his own body, and that was... really weird. The illusion’s legs and arms moved the way Steve could feel himself moving, but they were so far away... “I’m good. Let’s go.”

“Yeah, you better leave the talking to me,” said Tony, with a decisiveness and authority that seemed downright bratty coming from a little girl. Or maybe adorable.

This was so weird.

Fortunately, they didn’t need to move any faster than a shuffle, since that was all that the matriarch could move at. Steve thought about suggesting that she be carried in a chair, and then looked at the way her two helpers paid attention to her every movement, and thought better of it – if the lady wanted to walk, well, evidently she was used to getting her way. It made the trip up to the temple just bearable – serum or no, it was a damn good thing Tony would be dropping the illusion as soon as they had the drop on the monster, because there was no way that Steve could fight effectively like this. Especially not when the shield sat so _wrongly_ on his arm.

What felt like an eternity later, they reached the temple – a walk that had taken them only a few minutes at a sedate pace earlier that day. The old woman straightened up as best she could with the curve in her spine, and told them gently, “Go on, children. Go into the temple and stay there until morning. We will come back for you then, and have a great feast.”

Tony’s little girl face was full of doubt and uncertainly, not at all covered by a child’s attempt at bravery; the sight of it made Steve nearly choke on rage. This woman had said those same words before, to _actual_ children, knowing that they were going to their deaths – he turned away toward the temple, letting his hands ball up into fists. God save him from adults who felt they had no other choices.

The illusion of the girl reached out and grabbed the sleeve of the illusion Steve was wearing – and something also closed on Steve’s arm, although Steve couldn’t see it. Then again, he couldn’t see his _arm,_ either. “Not so fast, big brother,” said the girl, a hint of a whine in her voice, and Steve slowed his stride – of course. A kid couldn’t cover that much distance so fast. “I can’t keep up.”

“Sorry,” whispered Steve, barely more than a breath.

 _“No talking,”_ scolded Tony over the comm.

There were already lights inside, candles that the villagers had been bringing in all day – candles, and offerings, including pillows and small toys to amuse children who would eventually get tired and fall asleep long before the monster showed up. Unlike previous years, hangings had been added to all the walls as well, covering the bare stone from floor to ceiling – Steve’s idea. The ones over the doors covered quick-release portcullises that Tony and the village smith had designed and cast two days before. The hangings themselves were marvels of art and, so Tony claimed, technology – the cloth couldn’t conceal a living presence, but it would hide the extension of the walls perfectly. Since they didn’t know anything about the skills of the creature other than that it was sneaky and good at running away, they’d stacked the deck in favour of trapping it in there with them.

“We could hide explosives with this,” Steve had speculated.

“We’ve tried,” the matriarch had told him, her face grim and grieved. “It wounded the creature. It killed the children.”

There needed to be some sort of bait, to get the monster into the temple.  Steve let his eyes close, shutting out the colours of the offerings and tapestries – warped as they were by the illusion, they were nausea-inducing. Tony’s hand on his arm guided him fully into the temple: he could tell because the cloying smoke thickened almost unbearably. _No more kids_ , he promised the place silently.

“Lots of toys here,” commented Tony aloud, in that little girl’s voice – it was beginning to be more than a bit creepy. He let go of Steve’s arm and wandered over to examine a pile of offerings on the far side; Steve cracked one eye open to better keep track of him. “And look, a place to sleep. I’m tired, aren’t you?”

 _Very,_ Steve thought, but instead of answering he faked an enormous yawn. He wasn’t the sort of tired that any sleep would help with – he _had_ actually slept earlier that day, after he’d managed to convince Tony to catch a few hours’ rest.

“I’m going to sleep,” the little girl mumbled, and curled up with one of the blankets around her. _“I figured out what’s off about the design of this place – no right angles. Everything’s_ leaning _. The doors aren’t square, the walls aren’t – and none of it’s curved, either. It’s completely different from all the other buildings around here – built by somebody else entirely, maybe?”_

Steve found a patch of wall and sat down, shifting around until he found a position he could stay in for hours without discomfort – not easy, considering he was sitting on stone – that would still allow him to leap upward. At least sitting down like this he could close his eyes and shut out the beginnings of an _actual_ headache. Apparently even the serum could be overwhelmed by the type of off-kilter scenery that the cloaking device caused. Tony rambled away in his ear without need to pause for breath – a pleasant distraction, and something to ground him in the here-and-now without keeping his eyes open.

_“... give every mathematician over the age of forty a heart-attack. Multiple unique straight lines through two points? Even to me it sounds insane, but if you – oh, heads up, Cap. We got company.”_

Steve could feel it, too: a creeping sense of dampness. He roused himself enough to look around, but his vision was so off that it was pointless. He shut his eyes and listened, instead: Tony’s little-girl illusion even had the sound of breathing, sub-audible to human ears, and it pinpointed him sixteen feet to Steve’s two o’clock. The occasional crackle, very small, from one of the candles; drafts, reaching through the mostly-open door; and, of course, the overpowering scent of incense, almost destroying his ability to smell anything else. Outside, the wind and the rain – and now inside, with a plunk of _drip, drip, drip_.

It wasn’t fully there. He opened his eyes again, but he couldn’t see it. The illusion of the little girl stirred restlessly in her sleep.

 _“Come on, you bastard,”_ Tony breathed in Steve’s ear.

They waited. Steve did not dare move, for fear of making some sound that would give him away as something other than what his illusion seemed to be. The damp presence grew stronger, and Steve felt condensation collecting on his face. _Drip_. _Plunk_. They waited. Steve closed his eyes and recalled to mind the new balance of his shield – imagined feeling it in his hand, how it would arc, how that little bit less mass would affect it as he swung. They waited, and Steve pictured exploding into a standing position, ran the angles at which he’d have to duck to avoid Tony’s fire. He knew this already. He knew it in his bones, and he let his mind empty of other concerns until his sole focus was remaining on that edge of movement.

 _Squish_ , _squish_ , went something, and Steve remained motionless except to open his eyes. The monster beyond the river-side door was perhaps eight feet high, a mad scientist’s nightmare attempt to cross a person with a fish gone wrong. It had two legs, and it carried a trident in its hands – but it was stretching the definition to call those hands, although they could apparently grip quite well. Its head was fully that of a fish, bent down on an eel-like neck so that it could look forward, its mouth opening and closing obscenely; and it was dressed in river weeds. It dripped mud and muck onto the floor with every step it took closer to the door.

The little girl illusion sat up. “Who’s there?” she called, and her high voice was tremulous, afraid.

“Oh ho ho,” boomed the river monster, in a voice deep enough that Steve could feel it in his bones. It wasn’t at all like he thought a fish would sound like. “Two tasty treats are awaiting me!” It stopped in the doorway and stared at them, hands planted on its hips, smugly satisfied.

The little girl screamed – high-pitched, ear-piercing – and scrambled away until she, until Tony, was on the opposite side of the room and strategically positioned to pin the thing between him and Steve. Steve waited. They had one shot at this. They could not let it get away.

“ _Noisy_ little treats,” said the fish-monster, sounding annoyed, and it squished its way into the room in a hurry, reaching for the illusory girl with one webbed and slimy hand.

“Try snacking on this,” said the little girl, and opened her glowing palm to blast the fish-monster in the face.

It reeled back and behind it, now between it and the door it had come through, Steve exploded to his feet, shield up, the world righting around him as the illusions dropped. A rush of air informed him that Tony had triggered the portcullises, a moment before the blocks met the floor with synchronized _clang_ s. The shield sung in Steve’s hand, its harmonics familiar but changed, and he brought it around and _down_ – but the fish, although reeling from Tony’s surprise attack, was _fast_ – and tough. A repulsor blast like that would have put a hole through any human; the fish-monster was just badly burned. And not so badly burned that it didn’t get its trident around in time to block Steve’s strike, either, and parry the follow-up – with the sort of force that Steve associated more with Asgardians.

“Treachery!” it wailed, a booming din, as Steve flattened himself to the floor and two blue beams – Tony’s lasers – crossed the air overhead. Something thumped wetly to the floor, and the fish screamed, then screamed again as Steve whipped his leg around to kick in the back of its knee. Watery blue light burst like a star above his head, and Tony began cursing. A trident-point nearly skewered Steve’s leg, and he rolled away, flinging himself back up to his feet – and the monster set off some sort of flare that left him blind.

He could hear it squishing, fleeing – he flung his shield forward and himself after it, and heard the satisfying _thruung_ of the shield meeting its target – but Tony’s armoured grip closed on his shoulder with a hasty, _“Shit do_ not _walk into that, Steve!”_

Steve froze; his shield arced back around and, lacking him to grab it, clattered against the temple wall behind him. The bright white that had taken out his vision faded to spots, and he blinked hard: he could barely make out something like a watery blue net in front of him, fading almost as rapidly as his vision was returning. The portcullis across the main door had been blasted open and the fish-monster was nowhere to be seen – but over the sound of the rain, Steve could hear a loud splash, as if something enormous had just belly-flopped into the river.

“Yulong – ”

Tony remained still for a moment, then shook his head, a short, jerky motion. _“It dove straight out. The river-nanites – we can’t follow it.”_

They’d missed their shot.

 “These people are going to starve.”

_“Maybe it’ll convince them to pack up and move instead of letting it chow down on their kids.”_

“If they could move they would have before,” Steve said grimly. “You don’t know what starvation’s like.” The gnawing, empty feeling – he’d stolen and lied for food, once, at the worst of times. Though he’d never have let a kid be _eaten_.

Damn it. What now?

 _“Should’ve used missiles on it anyway,”_ muttered Tony, going over to the long, scaled arm lying grotesquely on the floor of the temple. He picked it up and checked the stump. _“The lasers cauterized it, it won’t even bleed out.”_

“Too close-range for missiles,” Steve muttered. Although with Tony, maybe not. But then again, Tony knew his own arsenal best – if Tony _hadn’t_ used missiles, in the face of whatever the fish had been throwing at him that Steve hadn’t quite caught, then it had probably been the best course of action at the time.

Tony was already stomping his way out of the temple, the metal of his boots meeting the stone of the steps and then the road with harsh, abrupt _clicks_ that spoke of stress and strain – except that for all that the road _looked_ like stone, it really, probably wasn’t. It didn’t break or shatter beneath Tony’s feet, at least. Steve retrieved his shield, and snuffed a few candles that had gotten overturned in the fight before they could start any minor fires. The people of this village would need the rich offerings they’d left in the months to come.

The elderly woman, again supported by her two younger relatives, was waiting for them at the doorway of the house they’d been staying at: she only needed to take one look at the fish arm and Steve’s face to find their answer, or perhaps she, too, had heard the splash. “You failed.”

Steve met her eyes. There was no recrimination there – nor even resignation. He couldn’t read her at all. “I’m sorry. It might stay away,” he nodded to the severed arm, “but we couldn’t kill it.”

“It had to be tried,” she said, and with the help of her aides, she turned and slowly made her way inside. A few white flakes drifted in after her – the rain had turned to snow.


	7. The Koi Fish

By morning it had stopped snowing, and the skies had cleared for the first time in five days; the temperature, however, had dropped straight past freezing and well into the negatives. Steve woke from nightmares about the ice to find Tony piling extra blankets on top of him. _“You were shivering_ ,” he informed Steve through the comm.

Impending starvation or no, the household’s breakfast could have been mistaken for a feast. No one was in particularly _good_ spirits, but Steve, braced for blame, was surprised to find that the most they received was a very careful disinterest. As the dishes were being cleared away at the end of the meal, the matriarch cleared her throat.

“You think us wasteful,” she said, eyeing Steve’s empty bowl. “Or short-sighted. But the monster’s curse will break our stores no matter how carefully we husband them; it is better for us all to grow as fat as we can, and keep our reserves within ourselves.”

That made a certain amount of sense, Steve had to admit. The children at the meal, sleepy and over-stuffed with food, were being picked up by blank-faced parents and carried out.

“Perhaps its curse will be weaker this year, it having lost a piece of itself and needing to heal,” she continued. “If not... we will endure until next year.”

“When you’ll sacrifice more kids to it.”

The gentleness was gone in an instant. “You are leaving, traveller,” said the matriarch. “Do not judge those of us who must stay.”

“I am sorry,” said Tripitaka quietly. “When we next find a temple upon the road, I’ll tell them of your plight.” He had refused still the rich food, sticking to plain rice and water. If he kept it up much longer, Steve was going to have to tell him not to be an idiot – the people of this world might not be exactly human, but if they were close enough, then eating like that was only going to give him scurvy.

The matriarch shook her head. “If this cold continues then you will be able to prove your word on that matter soon,” she said, but she sounded so dismissive of the prospect that Steve found himself recalling Tripitaka’s earlier words on how much help a temple might be. Still, surely _Tripitaka_ couldn’t be the only monk willing to help other people? “The river is freezing fast – already it is too dangerous to cross by boat, but in another few days you will be able to make it on foot, unless the weather breaks. If that should happen then you will have to wait here for true winter to set in, and that will be some months more.”

 _“I better go take a look, then,”_ said Tony, climbing to his feet, and privately, _“Stay here, Steve. I promise I won’t run off.”_

“I should come with you,” Steve said in a low voice, but his heart wasn’t in it. The cold _inside_ was bad enough; when he’d stepped outside for a minute of fresh air earlier, it had felt like a slap to the face.

 _“I won’t be out of radio range,”_ Tony said, and Steve didn’t follow. Not immediately. He wanted to see Yulong first.

 

 

_“I don’t like it.”_

Steve’s breath fogged in front of him, instantly condensing to ice overtop of the scarf he’d borrowed. The suit Tony had made for him was good – very good; aside from his face, for the first fifteen minutes he hadn’t felt the cold at all. But once the cold got through it, it _stayed_ , and Steve had been forced to double back to the house and borrow additional warm-weather wear from their hosts.

“There’s a lot not to like,” Steve replied. “You’re gonna have to be more specific.” He picked his way over the shore with care. All of Tony’s rambling on about the properties of the nano-particles in the water had instilled a sense of caution; between the snow and the ice, it wasn’t always easy to see where the bank ended and the water began.

_“The water freezing over. The monster controls rain, drought – and it’s not behind this?”_

“You can scan for weak spots, can’t you?” His toes were beginning to go numb. Steve retreated to definite shoreline and took the time to stamp in place, a rhythmic march to keep his feet warm.

 _“Sure, doesn’t mean I’ll catch them all,”_ Tony said doubtfully. _“You don’t need to be out keeping a watch, you know.”_ So Tony’d noticed. How often was he keeping tabs on Steve’s location? Steve hadn’t told him he was going out, and Tony himself had still _been_ out, surveying the river – or the nanites, more like.

“Yulong doesn’t like the cold either. He’s a serpent.” And it was Steve’s fault that Yulong was out here, instead of in a nice, warm stable. Steve had asked him to try tracking the creature, one last time - if it hadn’t been for the fact that Yulong was a sea-serpent, a mythical creature, he’d have thought himself insane for dreaming it might be possible to track a fish through water. But Yulong, although he’d grumbled in a horsey way, had seemed to think it possible.

 _“He’s got enough blubber in his hide to put a whale to shame,”_ said Tony. _“I don’t think he’s having any luck, though. He has to stick to the shallows.”_

Of course Tony was _also_ keeping track of Yulong. Steve jumped up and down several times, drawing in painfully cold breaths, and allowed himself to feel foolish. _So what if Tony was keeping an eye on him?_ _You still had to be out here. You asked Yulong to come out here, you can stand witness._

 “How long before it finishes freezing thick enough?”

 _“Given the way the temperature_ still _hasn’t levelled out? Tomorrow. Morning. I don’t like it.”_

“You said that already. Give me another option.”

 

 

They set out with well-wishes and prayers for their good fortune directed at them by the villagers – by the two kids and their parents in particular. The last four were the only ones to follow them all the way to the docks – the kids bundled up until they resembled piles of clothing more than children.

They paused at the docks. Tripitaka, who was wearing almost as many layers as the children, called down in a formal voice, “I am sorry we could not slay the monster that plagues you.”

 _“Like you did anything, ass-munch,”_ Tony muttered on the comm.

“You have tried,” said one of the men. “You saved our children. For that we shall always be grateful.”

Steve turned away. He could only hope the kids would make it through the winter – which wasn’t off to an auspicious start.

“I hate this,” Tripitaka whispered quietly, as Yulong’s stepped forward off of the docks, placing each hoof with infinite care. Tripitaka had to be speaking to himself; any unenhanced human wouldn't have heard. “Always I am choosing between evils, and I hate it.”

Their progress was slow – by far the slowest they’d been going since they started. Tony had tied draw-string woolen booties over Yulong’s feet, but they weren’t the best for avoiding slipping on the ice; having six legs probably helped, but every time they tried to go faster than a walk, the dragon-horse balked with a nervous toss of his head.  Although they would have needed to go slower than normal in any case – there were occasional bends in the road, and right now the only one who could see them was Tony. If they ran off the side of the road before he could warn them, they might never make it back.  Still, at this rate they weren’t going to be off the ice by nightfall – and Steve really didn’t want to get caught out here at night.

 _“Either pick up your hooves or I’ll start_ dragging _you,”_ Tony snapped finally.

“I don’t want him to fall,” said Tripitaka from beneath all his layers. It was hard to tell with his voice so muffled, but Steve thought he might have sounded uncertain.

Steve didn’t really care. He put his effort into cajoling Yulong instead. “Come on. I’m standing on one side, Tony’s got the other – if you start to fall, we’ll keep you upright.”

 _“Dragging,”_ said Tony. _“Don’t think I won’t._ ”

It was kind of mean, but it worked. Steve breathed a sigh of relief when he could at last measure their progress against the nearness of the other bank – visible now, in the sharp, clear air, but it was featureless enough that until now all he’d had was Tony’s word, not the reassurance of seeing it draw closer with his own eyes.

 _“Ten degrees right,”_ Tony was saying, when the ice broke apart beneath them.

It was a smooth split, Steve had time to realize – it should have broken beneath Yulong’s weight first, but it hadn’t. It broke as though it had been cut with a knife. He backpedaled, grabbing for Yulong’s reins, but there was nowhere to backpedal _to_ – the ice behind them was gone and he was already falling, water rushing up over his head and the cold driving all the air from his lungs.

He reached up, desperately, and there was nothing above him but more water. Everything was blue light, brilliant, smooth, and uniform - wherever they’d fallen through the ice, the break was gone. His scarf floated over his face and he ripped it away, desperately, but he couldn’t see the others – there were shapes in the water, shapes he couldn’t make out and high-pitched chattering _voices_ , but he couldn’t understand any of them. His cold-weather clothing tangled about him, making his movements slow – no, that was the cold.

_Think, THINK! Find the damn break!_

He couldn’t breathe. Blue light was shining from below as strongly as it was from above – no, below _was_ above, Steve realized. That was the stronger and steadier light. But what was below? He couldn’t see and could barely stop himself from trying to look – he needed to find the break in the ice. He couldn’t swim up until he found it – if he swam up, he wouldn’t have enough of a view to find it. The urge to breathe was almost as strong as his panic, and he had water up his nose, clogging his throat. If he coughed, he’d inhale.

Something grabbed him from behind and he struggled, but he knew his movements were slow, sluggish. He could hear his pulse thundering in his head, and it was already slowing despite the adrenaline – he had to find the break, but he didn’t know where it was, wasn’t even sure which was up; his assailant had gotten them turned around. Something was dragging him through the water and to the ice and it wasn’t right, that wasn’t the break –

They broke through the ice at high speed and the sound of it shattering, of the air rushing by, almost deafened him. Was this real? He couldn’t tell. His skin had gone numb, the cold had already leeched into his bones – the world turned upside down a few times. Maybe it wasn’t numb.

 _“Steve, Steve, Steve – fucking_ look _at me, damn you – ”_

The world was white and blue, light reflecting through the water. Off the water? Under. It had to be under – he had drowned. He was going to die in a minute. It was too cold.

The water buffeted him – no? Not the water. Red. Was he – it wasn’t blood. They were on land – at the bottom of the ocean – the ice was all around – he struggled against it but the weight of water was like a giant fist, holding him tight to the pilot’s chair –

_“ – I know you didn’t lose consciousness, come on, you’re just walkabout but you need to come back now – ”_

It was too warm, swelteringly warm – wasn’t that the last stage? Death was not far off, then. His mind was shutting down; he thought he was warm again. He’d read that in a journal that – that Leo had gotten for him, back in therapy, in – New York, in the future, the present – Leo had taught him breathing exercises.

He sucked in a breath and counted. It was a lot harder than it had been back in Leo’s office.

“Oh thank God,” said Tony, momentarily releasing Steve from the bearhug he’d had him in, and checking his face again. “You back?”

“Y-yeah,” Steve said, starting to shiver – he wasn’t really all that cold, though. Tony’s suit was radiating heat like a furnace, and – he glanced around. They were pretty exposed out on the beach, with the only meagre shelter coming from one rounded boulder. Far out past them, a dark edge in the river showed where Tony had broken through the ice to get them out – or at least he assumed that was it. There was no sign of the break they’d fallen through.

“T-Trip-pi-t-tak-ka.” His teeth were chattering almost too hard to get the name out. Tony engulfed him in a bearhug again – his armour felt like a hot brand against Steve’s face, even though it wasn’t touching him, but all Steve could do was cling on like a limpet and try to soak up the heat.  Maybe he _was_ that cold. “Yulong. You got-t-ta – Tripitaka,” he tried again, and managed to say the same without his teeth locking up this time.

 _“It’s been too long, Tripitaka’s dead,”_ Tony said, voice robotic – he’d put the faceplate back down. Good; otherwise he’d freeze, too.

“C-cold water,” Steve managed. “Preserves p-people – they can – thaw out. B-be alive. Not just – Capsicles. Read about it.” Not _much_ longer, though. Yulong might be able to breathe under water – Yulong was probably fine - but he doubted Tripitaka could.

_“Shut up and focus on getting warm.”_

“You c-can’t – let him d-die.”

_“I damn well can – ”_

“No – you can’t l-let him – you know what he’ll do.” Almost an entire sentence in one go – Steve made himself relax his fingers, but he couldn’t quite manage to force Tony away.

 _“He won’t,”_ Tony said flatly, but he’d drawn away, just a little bit.

“Might.” Steve couldn’t take that chance. Couldn’t let Tony scream for all eternity. And if it were the other way around – if Tripitaka _didn’t_ use the collar – if he clung true to his own beliefs about cruelty and kindness, even in the face of the thrice-damned _greater good_ –

_“You’ll freeze again.”_

He would. He knew it like he knew the ache of the cold in his bones.

“I’ll survive. Go look, or I’ll th-throw myself back in and look m-myself,” Steve threatened. Tony didn’t move; Steve dug in his fingers again and forced himself to straighten his arm muscles, shoving Tony away – and the loss of the heat felt like he’d made good on his threat. He grunted. “Go.”

 _“God fucking damn you,”_ Tony muttered. He turned away, and those panels unhooked from his forearms – a moment later, and the contents of his subspace pocket dropped out of nowhere. The noise of it left Steve reeling even further, and unable to hear Tony put most of it away again, except for the stacks of metal sheets and a single glowing arc reactor. Some of the sheets Tony stabbed into the ground, creating a wind-break; then he grabbed two more, and folded them in half, while what seemed like most of the armour’s chest-piece melted down off of him and draped itself over Steve. The arc reactor landed on top.

Steve had to clap his hands over his mouth – the metal was hot, _way_ too hot, even though he knew it was probably barely room temperature, it felt like burning.

Tony clutched the folded bit of gold-and-silver – titanium? – metal to his chest, and nanites melted around it from the back to hold it on. It looked bulky, out of place – it wasn’t proper armour...

 _“Stay awake,”_ Tony ordered, and then he was gone.

 

 

 

Tracking.

_this is a fucking joke_

There was no way that he was going to be able to locate Tripitaka under the ice. His best hope was that Yulong – whom he’d last seen exploding into the enormous river-dragon that they’d first met him as – had managed to grab the idiot, and maybe could even keep him alive. The way the nanites’ fields made the spatial-temporal distortion _worse,_ there was no way Tony was going to find them short of an act of god. And he really did _not_ want to run into one of those right now.

Honestly, the biggest surprise was that he hadn’t been reduced to a gibbering wreck already by a vengeful Tripitaka. For all that he’d told Steve that Tripitaka wouldn’t... it was just a matter of time. Tripitaka was the kind of cowardly asshole who’d beat up civilians, kids, and when caught claim he’d _had_ to, he’d had no choice, someone else had made him.

Perhaps he was still unconscious. There was a thought – maybe they could cryofreeze him, put him on ice long-term like Cap had been.

Jesus, he hoped Steve survived this. The odds weren’t in favour of Tony making it back.

Elevation: 3.02  
External temperature: 232  
Distance from S. Rogers: ERROR

Tracking. 

He tossed as much processor space over to the plotter program as he could spare, hesitated, and shut down some other secondary processes to free up some more for it. If he lost his way back to Steve –

_stop_

Well, he wouldn’t lose his way back to Steve. That was all there was to it.

 _close wifi_  
close extrnl_ALL.access  
close ports ALL

The ice had already frozen over the hole he’d made to drag Steve out; Tony broke through in another location instead, the plotter spelling out wormholes and spatial ripples. The water closed over his head and the nanites shrieked into his brain, despite everything he could do to shut himself off from them. The freezing cold leached through to his chest – until the nanites reduced the plating to more nanites, his ad-hoc measure was more of a heat sink than a heat source. It was almost a welcome distraction.

When the ice had collapsed the first time, he’d hit the thrusters – and been too slow to grab the others, to keep them from falling in. He hadn’t been expecting the data surge beneath the water, then. It buffeted him now, worse than any physical current – all of it junk, except it couldn’t be – it had to be behind the distortions in physical space, so much worse here than they were ten kilometers up, but he had no idea how to uncode it. No idea how to read it. So: junk.

Elevation: -15  
External temperature: 274  
Distance from S. Rogers: ERROR

Tracking. 

_damnit tripitaka, where are you_

Scanning for the road’s signature proved futile – they’d moved _far_ away from it. He let himself drift down, and hit the thrusters to bring him slowly upstream – such as it was. Any directions in this place were so relative to their immediate location that they were largely meaningless. Upstream, downstream – they might as well have been on another planet from the road. He might as well be on another planet from Tripitaka. Within the vastness of the river’s depths, he had no idea where to even begin looking.

Except that maybe there was a god paying attention after all.

_shit I hope not_

Down on the floor of the river-bed was one of those trident-carrying fish-people – which, oddly, did not look all that much like the original fish-monster, aside from the scales. But he’d have won money in Vegas betting that they worked for the guy, because the last time he’d seen them – just before he grabbed Steve and vamoosed – they’d been getting their fishy asses handed to them by Yulong.

The armour handled like a whale in the water compared to how it was in the air – but it was still Tony’s design, and that was to say, sleek, manoeuvrable, and fast. He was on the fish-creature before it had time to do more than squawk. Admittedly, his usual tactic of slamming bad guys against a wall and looming in their faces didn’t work so well when blunt force was as muted as this. Maybe if he pulled the guy up above the surface – but then they’d both be lost.

He settled for tightening his grip on the creature’s neck, and letting the repulsors heat warningly. _“Where are they?”_

It tried to bring the trident around, and Tony yanked the weapon away, tossing it aside. Since they were underwater, it didn’t go very far – there was a trick to aiming the things that he couldn’t be bothered to spare the processing power to calculate. “Who?” it asked squeakily.

 _“Your boss had two of my people grabbed.”_ The armour’s growl came out even more menacing underwater. Nice – he should look into making this the armour’s usual voice. _“Tell me where they are. NOW.”_

“I don’t – urk,” said the fish-creature. Tony squeezed again, and learned that the look of knowing that you were out of your league was surprisingly similar between fish-people and humans. “I’ll take you to the palace?”

_“Start swimming.”_

 

 

Steve dreamed. Not of the ice.

_There was a church burning in front of him. Its walls rose high above, its roof ending in the curve of a pagoda, and there was no cross atop it, but Steve knew it was a church: built to a god described in a human book, a god who argued with other gods, who made mistakes like other gods - not a God at all. The church burned, but Steve’s blood had already turned to fire, ignited by the colours he shouldn’t be able to see, the sounds that burned at the edges of his hearing. The stench of decay wasn’t wood-smoke, but it was ruin nonetheless. He walked through the doors and fell to his knees at the altar, and the fires roared higher, feasting upon his flesh._

_“I told you I was listening,” Tony whispered in his ear. “Did you forget?” His hand was a vise about Steve’s throat – he couldn’t have breathed even if the superheated air had any oxygen left to give. Tony’s voice was the armour’s – was JARVIS’ voice – no, was ULTRON’s: “I cannot permit you to threaten my world. I am sorry.”_

Tony, _he thought, and,_ No, this isn’t the way. _“Nnn-” he couldn’t force the words past his lips._ Please _, he begged, desperate for air, grabbing at the arm that held him immobile, held him in the fires burning ever hotter. “Nn-”_

_“Ashes to ashes,” murmured Tony, and the wall crumbled in front of them, the altar blown away by the shockwave that would have tossed Steve aside, except for Tony’s inexorable, iron grip. The mushroom cloud bloomed in the distance, and Steve could see it reaching for him –_

_“Dust to dust.”_

_“No_ -” Air came suddenly, _freezing_ air, and Steve choked into wakefulness. His lungs spasmed, rejecting the cold dry air in a way they hadn’t since the nineteen-forties, and the dream was driven from his head as he focused on thinking _no, slow, breathe out_ –

It had never worked when the doctors back then had told him his asthma was all in his head; but with the serum in his veins it actually _was_ all in his head. The air was biting and _real_ ; he breathed deep, and again, and ran through a mental checklist. _‘Stay awake,’_ Tony had told him. Fine job of _that_ he’d done. He’d be lucky if he didn’t lose his hands and toes to frostbite – except that there was something covering them, the same type of thing that was covering the rest of him, and it was... warm. Not the warmth of a deluded mind on the verge of dying: _actually_ warm.

He opened his eyes and looked down. His uniform was covered in strands of silver that shone gold at an angle – his face, too, by the feel of it. The arc reactor that Tony had created to power the illusions sat on his chest, with thick cords of the strange material coming out of it, merging seamlessly into the metal wrapping the rest of him – but he could move. It _let_ him move, although it was like wearing clothes made out of metal much heavier than it looked. Which, he supposed, did make some sense.  

Steve sat up. He had to catch the arc reactor to prevent it from falling off – if it was keeping this stuff running warm, then he bet that wouldn’t be the best idea.

The snow within his makeshift wind-shelter had all melted, but he could see through the gaps that this ended not so far away. Since there was no roof on top of it, he could also see that the sun was more than half-down, and dipping lower. Judging from the way that his nose froze every time he breathed in – and this _despite_ the warm metal criss-crossing his lower face – it hadn’t warmed up any throughout the day. The occasional gusts of wind that made it through the cracks kept making his face freeze, although with the assistance of the wires his uniform was enough to keep the rest of him warm.

His stomach rumbled. Reluctantly, Steve pulled a ration bar from his belt and sat for a while contemplating it. It was his last one. Should he eat part of it now? He wasn’t _that_ hungry yet – but even the occasional bite of cold was enough to make him shiver with memory.

 _First things first, Rogers,_ he told himself firmly. His shelter needed work. If he could cut out the wind better then he wouldn’t be half as cold, and he wouldn’t get half as hungry, either, from his metabolism trying to make up for the wires’ deficiency in warming him. The bank was high enough that he could dig into it a bit, here - he slung his shield off of his arm and brought it down, watching as it sank into the earth. Yup – the ground was frozen, but vibranium trumped rock-solid ice. Good; that meant he wouldn’t have to move away from this spot to find better shelter.

If he did that, Tony might not be able to find him again.

He had maybe a half-hour left before the sun went down, and the temperature would plunge even further. Steve started digging. The soil was more pebbles than dirt, and after he loosened the frozen top layer, became easy enough to move; the bigger problem was trying to get it to stay _put_ to act as better wall, and something to support a metal plate for a roof. The boulder, at least, provided one solid wall: it was rounded on top, but it clearly was stuck into the dirt for some ways. It also didn’t fit the rest of the bank – the pebbles were silky black, but the boulder was a much lighter coloured stone, with streaks of green – copper? Tony would know. Steve amused himself by finding mental patterns in the random markings: cloud-watching, for stones. Each scoop of dirt revealed another object: a house, a turtle, a fish...

His shield hit something just below the top of the dirt, and Steve threw himself back almost before he’d registered what had happened: the copper-green veins flared with their own light, tracing bright emerald fire up the side of the boulder before vanishing just as it reached the top. The adrenaline rush had all his senses wide open – but that was it.

Cautiously, Steve stepped forward, and brushed away more of the dirt with his hand. It was more of the fish – and it really _was_ a fish, now. What had been before was a fanciful imagining: now the copper lines had changed, and _these_ ones had been painted by a skilled artist. There was no mistaking the house he’d seen before – now, he could pick out that it was a large house, with many rooms; he could tell the pattern on the turtle’s shell, and even the look of shame on its face. The fish’s ugly, open mouth was closing about a screaming child... the picture faded to the right, but in the light of the arc reactor, more of the copper lines were slowly thickening and thinning into something that made more sense.

The arc reactor – made from a piece of his shield. Huh. Steve brought his shield forward, and tapped it gently against the lines.

The flash this time was just as beautiful as beautiful as before – lighting up the imagery and vanishing. Steve blinked away the after-image and examined what had been revealed: the fish, growing smaller... or, no. He considered it again. The movement was to the _left_... right to left writing? Or pictography, rather. The fish had been small, but had grown – he tapped the shield again, and half the boulder seemed to blaze for a glorious moment, leaving behind a masterwork: a lady’s – a _princess’_ – garden, a pond, and the fish-monster had been but a simple fish within it. Then it had escaped – his fingers traced the picture left – and had grown, out of control, but it still seemed... small. There was something beneath it that held it – he dug his fingers further into the dirt, and felt something like wire.

There was something buried at the foot of the boulder.

 

 

 

 

Elevation: -31  
External temperature: 277  
Distance from S. Rogers: ERROR

Tracking. 

The depths of the river were far from lightless: it was the purest water that Tony had ever seen, aside from the ridiculous amounts of nanites – but those actually _amplified_ each EM wave, boosting the transmission. They also had to be responsible for supporting the macro-scale life, because otherwise the water was _way_ too pure for schools of brilliantly-coloured fish – and occasionally, many-tentacled horrors – that swum by as he and his captive made their way to the fish-monster’s lair. That, or they were all anaerobic lifeforms. The dissolved oxygen level was averaging out at thirteen parts _per trillion_. Somewhere back on Earth, a xenobiologist was crying at all the opportunities they were missing.

_too damn bad for them I am_ not _taking samples_

It was a damn good thing that extremis could split O2 out of water, or he’d have been screwed – this armour only had five minutes worth of onboard oxygen. As they swam, he left a little trail of hydrogen behind him, which quickly dissolved into the water – no doubt acidifying it, whoops. Not that it mattered – the river was big enough (hah, _that_ was an understatement) that it could take it.

The bottom dropped another fifty metres, and within the underwater basin, looking rather meagre by comparison, sprawled a small palace. “There,” it burbled, shifting uncomfortably – he hadn’t let go if its neck. “That is where our king lives.”

 _“Great,”_ said Tony. _“You can introduce me.”_ He squeezed a bit for emphasis.

They jetted down. ‘Palace’ was really giving it too much credit; Tony had houses larger than this. _Had_ had houses... well, now he had mine-shafts larger than this. Possibly someone who drove a Volvo for reasons other than ‘to blend in’ would have found it impressive, but it was hardly Versailles. It did have better lawn ornaments than the French had managed, though: an actual real-live dragon, all bound up in netting. _Electrified_ netting. That was just cruel – cruel, and, he had to admit, apparently very practical. Yulong was out cold, although he occasionally twitched as a pulse ran through the metal mesh. His guards were perfectly safe; the water was so pure that its conductivity was next to nil.  

The half-dozen fish-people standing guard – mostly gawking – around Yulong looked up sharply as Tony’s captive let out a distressed, high-pitched cry. Their response, at least, was professionally swift – tridents up, battle-stances... assumed, for a given variation on ‘stance’ that incorporated 3D space. It was probably a damn good thing, Tony mused, that he was used to flying; at least he wasn’t at a complete disadvantage here. They definitely had an edge in technology, though – his scans weren’t penetrating below the first floor of the house, and they only showed perhaps twenty other people, a few uni-directional shields, and no active defenses at all. There had to be more of the same illusion technology that the monastery in the mountains had employed.

He sure _hoped_ that they were somehow tricking his scans, anyway, because if that was _all there was_ , he was going to feel pretty damn insulted.

And then he was going to kill them all. Petty, feudal tyrants, picking out a territory and slaughtering civilians who couldn’t defend themselves –

_stop_

He let his captive go with a blast of steam to urge it onward. The fish-thing swam towards its fellows, rather than away, yelling in a high-pitched voice that carried extremely well in water, “Gimme a weapon! He’s crazy!”

 _“I am pretty mad, yeah,”_ Tony noted. Effective repulsor weaponry range was down to less than a metre, and missiles built for an airy environment were right out; fortunately, _lasers_.

There were a lot of problems in life that could be solved with the targeted applications of lasers. It seemed like he discovered more every day.

“Halt!” cried one of the fish-people, brandishing a shiner-than-the-others’ trident at him. “What is your business accosting one of our lord’s guards?”

 _“I’m gonna give you a count of ten to release the dragon and also tell me where you stashed the monk,”_ Tony replied, hitting the boot thrusters just lightly enough to hold his position in the water despite the mild current. _“Ten.”_

“You’re obligated – ”

_“Nine.”_

“ – under laws of – ”

_“Eight.”_

“ – trespass to –”

_“Seven.”_

“Just kill him already!” cried the one that Tony had ‘accosted’, grabbing a trident away from the nearest guard to it – which squawked in outrage, and tried to grab it back. The first fish-person had already swum just out of range, however, and now levelled the trident at Tony and – fired?

 _“Sixfivefourthreetwoone,”_ Tony yelped, a burst of audio indistinguishable to the ordinary human ear – the fish-people didn’t seem to like it either, screeching at a truly god-awful frequency and firing more tridents, which -  _fuckfuckfuck they did not do this before._ ‘This’ being to shoot a bolt of bright energy that broke chemical bonds like they were nothing and then let them reform for extremely damaging results. He’d been two slow to entirely dodge the first hit, which had blown apart his left boot repulsor – and also part of his foot, ow, half-burned flesh crisping off, ow, un-cauterized blood vessels dumping extremis-rich blood into the water, _ow run painblockALL.patch_

Warning: System critical operations may be affected

_ override  _

Damage subroutines stopped screaming at him. He shunted them and half the others into low-priority status and dumped them off the register – his last thought before doing so that  _defragging tonight is going to be a priority son of a bitch_ and then his operating system was no longer running any programs that could support such speculation. All the freed space went into targeting as he overclocked every processing node he could, calculations working around the nanites to provide inhuman precision even in a system-hostile environment. The left-hand laser fired slowly, methodically, sixty times in half a second, and Yulong’s massive bulk drifted free; it finished by flashing downward, cauterizing his own human flesh and stemming the flow of blood from what had been his left ankle. The right-hand laser was quicker, precision less a concern: three tridents and four fish-people were cut to shreds, their own weapons firing to no avail.

Three of the fish-people, however, survived; they’d had their tridents raised in a more defensive position, which – Tony could begin to appreciate as the targeting systems returned their stolen memory – probably was keyed to their usage. Golden half-domes of light sparked whenever Tony’s laser should have fried them. Damn. To make matters worse, Yulong was drifting downstream, showing no signs of returning to consciousness.

The surviving fish people had some sense: they didn’t try to attack him, just kept their tridents in defensive position and the shields raised as they backed toward their ‘house’. Tony hung in the water and calculated odds. Yulong was still drifting downstream. He probably wouldn’t get too far before he got caught on the cliff-face of the drop that Tony had swum over on his way here, but tracking the possible wrinkles in space-time that might make that drop _very_ far away was impossible without giving the matter memory from the plotter tracking _Tony’s_ location, respective to Steve – so Yulong was on his own.

The house, then. It had uni-directional shields, but not everywhere; if these bozos didn’t want to let him in the front door, he’d just have to cut an entrance through a wall. He hit the boot thrusters, and... nothing happened. Backups tried to compensate, smaller repulsors on his back that had been aimed down – the front ones were gone, replaced by a hunk of next-to-useless metal slowly being chewed into a form he could work with – but the whole system was out of whack, data missing, and the resulting uneven application of force sent him tumbling sideways into a cartwheel.

_ oh, shit _

_ end process painblockALL.patch _

Warning: System critical operations may be affected

_ yeah this is gonna suck _

_ override  _

“Oh, _fucking Christ_!” Tony half-shouted, half-sobbed as detailed damage descriptors hit him, the human side of his brain processing them as pain and almost overwhelmed. Almost, because he’d had an unfortunately large amount of practice in dealing with unblockable pain recently. “Oh god, oh hell – ”  _just ignore it just ignore it ignore it_ – the fish-people’s return barrage – from those who had used their tridents as _offensive_ weapons – hadn’t entirely missed its mark. The armour had withstood the first two direct hits on it they’d gotten, propulsion – always the most vulnerable point – being knocked out by those and other glancing blows, yet the suit maintaining integrity. But the _third_ direct hit had been to the chest – and that wasn’t armour there, not yet. That was just a seal to keep the water out – and now it wasn’t even that, thanks to the hole in the middle. Low oxygen level warnings flashed and he clapped a hand over the gap – extremis fused it the gauntlet to it instantly – before he could get a better look at it. He really didn’t want to know what his lung looked like,  _oh christ fucking ow_.

The fish-people were still retreating slowly. That was good; time gave extremis the chance to build slightly better patches – five seconds and half his backup propulsion was functional again. He got his hand back as soon as enough nanites had transferred to his torso for extremis to effectively function as bone and muscle mass there.  It left the armour over the entirety of his left arm critically thin.

The fish-people were backing towards the house – not a retreat, now, but a _threat_ , because once they were behind the uni-directional shielding, they could use their own tridents as weapons. He needed to stop them, first – he skimmed up and to the side, but they all just turned to face him, of course. Didn’t matter: it delayed them from getting behind those passive defenses. But there were other people in the house, and once they got a look at what was going on...

_time to start pulling out some other tricks here_.

What he needed was a _distraction_. He stretched out his right hand, away from his body as he could get it, while the subspace warp creaked online and he flooded his ears and other auditory sensors with what nanites he could spare – this was going to leave him deaf on all levels.

The lack of subtlety on the part of the subspace pocket wasn’t just because of air – or, in this case, water – rushing in to fill the void left behind when he shoved something out of this universe. True, it did make for a loud bang, just like a gunshot did – but that was because he’d modulated the frequencies of the pocket opening to destructively overlap enough to _mostly_ cancel each other out. If he _didn’t_ apply that modulation, or if, even better, he shifted them to _constructively_ interfere - 

_ run soundOff.patch _

Warning: System critical operations may be affected

_ override  _

The world went silent, and Tony tossed about a litre of the water into his subspace pocket. If nothing else, he really _should_ grab some samples of the nanites in the water.

Since he’d turned his hearing off – and the associated damage reporting – the only way to judge the effects was by sight. That was preferable to leaving his hearing _on_ , though, since if he’d done that he’d now be a twitching heap at the mercy of the river’s current... just like the three guards. He took advantage of their state to cut apart them and their tridents with lasers, in utter silence.

When was the last time it had been this quiet inside his own head? He didn’t know.

He cut through one wall of the house and jetted inside – still slow, still repairing, especially since he’d moved recovery of at least basic auditory sensing capability up the priority list. His left boot thruster remained at the top of it. Without those sensors – and a host of other delicate ones that had gone off-line at the burst – it was like swimming through mud: his vision was sharper than it had ever been before extremis, but he felt half-blinded anyway. Sensors struggled to scan through walls – most of the motion within the house had stopped, but there was still some, and he couldn’t get a lock on it easily.

Well, let them come to him. The more time, the more repairs he could complete with extremis. He cut through a piece of the back hallway – the walls _here_ were not silk, but riverweed – and headed toward one of three likely areas that he’d pin-pointed earlier – likely to hold Tripitaka, that was, because the atmosphere in those rooms was _much_ less dense than the water around them.

...which was its own problem, actually, because they were some ninety-one meters down and probably going to need a quick exit. He might just have to hope that Tripitaka was up to withstanding the bends. It wasn’t like the guy was actually human, after all.

He cut through the room’s weedy wall – it couldn’t actually be weed; weed wouldn’t have withstood the pressure differential – just enough to get a proper scan of whatever was inside. No use: no Tripitaka, or anything else living, for that matter.

One down, two to go. He left the room leaking air and swam past, cutting through another wall – living quarters? It looked almost like it had been a shrine before – no candles or incense, but the weed-paper scrolls hanging on the walls, bobbing gently in the local currents, plus the turtle shells lying carelessly scattered about, but heavily and carefully adored with jewels – huh, maybe plunder. The might-be-a-bed in the centre pointed to somebody who liked sleeping on a pile of gold when he could get it, and the next best thing when he couldn’t.

...that somebody was heading here from the front of the house at speed, a reactivating sensor warned him. Tony swore silently and jetted through. On the other side was something that had to be a kitchen – complete with underwater ovens – and beyond that, the next pocket of air in this place: a pantry?

He was cutting it too fine. Tripitaka was in there: Tony was sure of it. And the fish-monster was going to enter the room before Tony could grab him and go, while they were vulnerable to it – Tony turned and threw what he could into propulsion, twisting through the kitchen’s main door and slamming into the hall – and into the one-armed fish-monster charging from the other direction.

They went head-over-heels, water buffering them in a way that air and solid ground wouldn’t have; Tony’s gyroscopes, still half-reeling from the subspace pocket trick, compensated slower than the fish-monster’s did. Before he could recover, the creature had grabbed him by one leg –  _ow ow wow ow_ that was his _bad_ leg – and slammed him through a wall. The riverweed broke like glass, except sharper, not making it through the armour but scoring lines, minor damage – Tony brought the lasers around and fired.

Too slow – the damage Tony had already taken was slowing him down. Contrarily, the fish-monster actually seemed _faster_ for having lost a limb – or maybe that was the home-ground advantage – because it got its trident up into shield position in a heartbeat. Tony wasn’t used to fighting with the weight of water pressing down and slowing him, and this thing was: it didn’t have to calculate fluid dynamic equations, because it already knew all the answers through long experience.

It hadn’t used the trident as a shield or a beam weapon up on the surface, though – maybe those functions didn’t work except underwater? Possibly, they didn’t work anywhere except in this particular nanite-rich river.

It twirled the weapon, wicked-blue trailing from the tips and fogging the water – this one Tony _had_ seen before, and he threw himself toward the roof just in time to avoid it. It left behind dark, acidic streaks -  _pH: 2.2_ and that was just with what carried upward to Tony. The roof gave – he pulled clear. The fish, visibly enraged, followed him through the hole that he’d made.

In the distance, Yulong’s massive bulk was swimming rapidly towards them. Awesome. And about damn time.

 _“Get Tripitaka,”_ Tony shouted, his own voice completely inaudible to him. Pings to the suit’s speakers showed that they were in decent shape – comparatively – so he’d just have to trust that he had actually said that aloud.

The fish caught up to him again. Tony blocked the trident and retaliated with a laser beam, and was sent tumbling again as the fish activated the shield _right in his face_ : apparently it repelled physical objects. He needed to change the game on this thing and get it up to the surface – the subspace pocket trick probably wouldn’t work, since the fish was still swimming – and angry – when everything else in the house had been incapacitated. His lasers were barely good for blocking, and the nanites in the river were almost giving him a headache whenever the fish’s shield went off, although _that_ was barely noticeable through all of the other pain signals clamouring for his attention. The fish caught him again and pulled him down, slamming them both into the river-bed with Tony on the bottom. The weak plate protecting his chest buckled.

The crushing weight of Mjolnir on his chest –

“Even a mortal should know his betters. You will address me as king or not at all.”

A blue flash went past them, rippling toward the ice far above: Yulong, carrying something that looked like a coffin inside his massive jaws. The fish-monster backed off, a look of _nasty_ frustration on its face, its mouth opening and closing like it was shrieking in anger. Tony panted for breath and clawed at the nanites’ datafeeds: junk, junk, more junk he couldn’t process, but every time the shield flared – there was something there, he just needed a moment to _think._ He barely blocked a beam from the trident with a subspace burst – scattering the beam in all directions – and stared at his own hand in surprise. He hadn’t honestly expected to manage that.

_end process soundOff.patch_

Noise, noise, noise – sound _assaulted_ him, leaving him dazed; too many of his audio-receptors were offline, or damaged, firing at random. Too many signals going off at once, to the point that he didn’t have enough processing power to read them with. He floated in the water, half-stunned into motionlessness – but that was fine, he didn’t need to be able to move to be able to code, to link the output from his audio sensors directly into his broadcast nodes.

He did need to be able to move to get out of the way of the trident heading for his head, though. The fish was snarling – and Tony couldn’t hear it again; the audio linkup was bypassing his brain, both biological and nanomechanical, entirely. That was fine – that was _great_. Except for the part where he _didn’t_ quite manage to get out of the way, and one of the points went right through the weakened armour on his left shoulder. The fish grinned in triumph – quite a feat, considering that mouth – and its shield flared, ripping Tony from the trident and, by matter of way, the barbed trident point back through his flesh –

 _open wifi_  
_open access.extrn_  
_open ports ALL_

\- and that was still fine, because Tony’s _right_ arm was the one that had the subspace inducer on it, and it was that hand he used to subspace another cubic centimetre of water.

The shield was still flaring as the massive shock of the discordant signals ripped through Tony and dumped directly into the local nanite network. The network – which, as massive as it was, was still only _locally_ as massive as it could be by number of nanites: and therefore, could be _locally_ disrupted, as it was whenever it opened up to communicate with the trident –

The golden shield fitzed out and something that could have been called Tony was aware of the loss of part of the network. Another part was aware of the forced shutdown of the  plotter.exe program as the local demand for memory exceeded network capacity. The wider network responded by reallocating resources, shunting data at a speed that could have been considered significantly faster than light, had that been a relevant benchmark: it wasn’t. The tiny bits of self-awareness carried along with that data were lost in the river’s network: a space several orders of magnitude larger than every network on Earth combined.

Tony hard-rebooted just in time to feel an angry fish-monster stab him again with the trident. Pain fired up along his mind and out into the network – leaving an emptiness that was like a balm. Already he could feel himself drifting away again –

_not again._

__close wifi  
close access.extrn  
close ports ALL

_“Eat laser, dickface,”_ he wheezed, bringing up his hand, and – nothing happened. He stared at his hand disbelievingly: there was blood pouring into the water from a long, wide, _deep_ slice across his forearm. How had he not noticed that? Probably had happened when he’d fried the trident. And now that he _had_ noticed it among the many damage reports, he wished he hadn’t. If it weren’t for the integrity of the surrounding exo-armour, he wouldn’t even _have_ a hand remaining, and  _Jesus Christ oh god stop moving it you moron OW_

“You stupid, wretched mortal!” the fish bawled right into his face. He wondered if it had fish-breath – well, there was _one_ advantage of being underwater. “You ruin my _house_ – you cut off my _arm –_ you make off with my _dinner_ – you ruin my _urk –_ ”

It shoved backward, fleeing as something massive closed around Tony – massive and dark, cutting off all the outside light... or maybe that was just the last of his sensors going down. Tony slammed against something that his physical, human body informed him was spongy and slightly giving, and there was acceleration, enough to make the damage reports start all clamouring for his attention again. And then, light – a view of some very large teeth, from distinctly the _wrong_ side – and then _much_ more light. He hit something very much not soft or spongy and rolled over, getting one good look at Yulong’s open, gaping mouth before Yulong shut it and bent his neck even further over Tony. He looked – worried. For a dragon.

 _“Did you just – ”_ Tony choked; there was something in his airway that he had the bad feeling was blood. _“Just – swallow me?”_

Yulong looked rather embarrassed. He opened his mouth again - _finally going to talk?_ Tony wondered – and then his neck arched _up,_ as he gave a roar of pain that split the sky. He thrashed forward and around – there was, improbably, a fish-person stuck to his back, trident embedded a good half-meter or more into flesh – blood gushed from between the broken scales. The fish-monster laughed, a great, booming laugh that seemed small and petty compared to Yulong’s enraged roars – a laugh that cut off abruptly as Yulong threw himself to the side, rolling over the trident and the fish-monster both, and driving the trident fully into his own flesh.

 _“No,”_ Tony rasped. The _idiot_ – too much blood stained the ice, Tony could hardly _see_ but he could see that. The fish monster was rising again – slowly, as if dazed –

“Hey!” shouted a voice from Tony’s other side. “Think you’re the big bad man here, d’ya? Fella, you’re just a little fish in _this_ pond!”

_ Steve? _

Too many critical systems were already requiring repair – he couldn’t divert more resources to audio, not when he had this much _tissue_ to regrow. Oh, god, he was actually going to have to eat something – metal alone was not going to cut it, here. But he did still have enough control over his neck to flop his head over to the other side – and, yup, unless he was hallucinating –

_ wouldn’t be the first time  _

\- that was indeed Steve standing there, armed with not his shield, but... a basket. One that appeared to be woven of reeds, and not very well, either: it was almost coming apart at the edges.

A roar on the other side; Tony flopped his head back that way. The fish monster was fleeing, and Yulong had gotten in its way, although with every movement more of his blood painted the ice. Fleeing – from the basket? Tony craned his head again – it was easier this time; the nicks in his lungs were closed, resources already been diverted to the next most critical task – just in time to see Steve throw the basket. Well. ‘Throw’ was a strong word – Steve _threw_ his shield, like a discus, but this he tossed like he was trying to win at horseshoes, letting it spin up and almost _float_ towards its target. Tony tracked the basket’s flight with his eyes – the fish was trying to flee, raising its hand so that a gust of wind blew the basket off-course –

In the moment of the fish-monster’s distraction, Yulong slammed it from behind with his tail, sending it hurtling through the air and face-first into the basket. There was a small ‘pop’, and the fish-monster vanished – the basket landed upright on the ice, bounced, and skidded gently to a stop.

“Tony, you okay?” Steve barked, jogging over – no, past: he was going for the basket.

Tony tried to push himself up on one hand and immediately thought better of it. _“Peachy.”_

Yulong definitely wasn’t okay – his great form was shuddering, every breath he took taking an evident toll – and hey, there was the last member of their party, a few dozen meters further past the hole in the ice than Tony: Tripitaka, huddled in a ball, sopping wet, surrounded by the shattered remains of the wooden box Yulong had fled with. No, not fled – Yulong had come back. And saved his life.

Steve reached the basket and bent down, his hand striking into it with the speed of a professional supersoldier – and coming back up holding a fish by the tail. A large fish – pretty colourful –

_fucking magic_ basket

Steve’s voice would have been too low for Tony to hear, but the no-longer-so-frigid wind was blowing his words directly to Tony. “I wish this hadn’t come to this. But I don’t know how long that basket’ll last, and you’ve had far too much time outside it.” He raised his hand high – and brought it down fast, breaking the fish’s skull open on the ice and killing it instantly.

 _“Steve,”_ Tony called. It came out like more of a croak.

Elevation: 0  
External temperature: 282  
Distance from S. Rogers: 11 

Steve looked up – and started jogging towards him, then stopped as Yulong gave another heaving breath. The dragon-horse’s blood was not pouring forth quite so freely anymore. “Shit,” Steve said, and Tony heard _that_ clearly.

 _“It’s warm,”_ said Tony. _“The ice. Gonna melt.”_ He needed to be able to stand up, right the fuck _now_. There was not a damn thing that Steve could do to save Yulong’s life – but Tony had lasers, he had _heat_ , he could cauterize –

Not that it was likely to do much good now.

He tried once more to pull himself upright and mostly made it. Steve abandoned staring at Yulong – probably concluding the same thing as Tony just had – and made it to Tony’s side in time to keep him from toppling over again. “How badly are you injured?”

 _“I’m fine, I’ll heal,”_ Tony assured him. He did have extremis, after all, although  _fuck_ it would’ve been nice if the healing could have been happening faster than its current rate. _“Yulong – he needs to be smaller – we need to get him off the ice before it cracks – ”_

_or before something_ else _comes along,_ Tony thought, as a dark form burst from the same hole that Yulong had made in the ice. Not a fish this time, oh no – a massive _turtle_ , its massive shell at least thirty centimetres thick – it tried to haul itself up onto the ice beside Yulong and the ice broke beneath its weight, sending Yulong rolling helplessly toward the water. The turtle reached out a fin, just barely stopping him –

“Oh, no,” it said, with a voice remarkably like Erik Selvig’s. Uncannily so, in fact. “I’d been about to thank you – but it looks like you need some help first. Just a moment – I think I still have some stores.” It vanished back beneath the surface.

Tony retracted the faceplate. The nanites that had comprised it were instantly re-purposed – now that it was gone, until he had more nanites available he’d have to re-order the priority list to get it back. Well, if the turtle proved hostile... it could probably just knock him over just by breathing on him hard, at this point. He turned to Steve. “Uh. That happened, right?”

“Wouldn’t be the strangest thing,” Steve agreed, and bent to lift Tony bodily.

“ _Ow_ Jesus fucking _warn_ me,” Tony hissed, curling in on himself – damsel in distress lift, _great_ , it was very distressing when he wasn’t _entirely certain his arm was still attached_ , thanks, Steve – Steve, who set off at a very careful, very smooth run, obviously taking care not to jostle him much. _“Ow.”_

“Yulong’s bleeding out, you can cauterize the wound, right?” Steve asked anxiously, taking him around to Yulong’s bad side – Tony could just see the hilt of the trident sticking out from the wound, but it had gotten moved around too much. Yulong was barely moving any more – was barely breathing.

“S’too late,” Tony murmured. The ice was covered in a pool of Yulong’s blood. He wished he had a hand to reach out with – did he? He didn’t want to cause Yulong more pain. But he would have touched Yulong if he could have – let him know that he wasn’t alone –

The turtle’s giant head popped out of the water, and it opened its mouth to display a mass of something that looked like – and _smelled_ like – road kill mixed with swamp muck. Tony gagged, his body shaking helplessly with the pain refreshed by the movement –

_oh, hell, no point not doing this anymore – run painblockALL.patch and_ yes _, override_

Funny; the lack of pain actually made the smell seem _worse_. But it also made it really hard to care.

“‘Uh ihss aww ihs ‘ung,” said the turtle, and Steve slowly set Tony down – he was probably aiming for ‘gently’, but with all damage reports blocked Tony honestly couldn’t tell – and, horror of horrors, reached into that mouth, ignoring the way the beak could likely have taken his arm off. Yet his hand emerged unscathed. Well, not unscathed – he was holding some of the... stuff, and that was a pretty awful fate. The turtle shut its mouth and swallowed – “Put it on his tongue – it only works if he is still alive, so you should hurry,” it said anxiously.

Steve jogged back around and pried open Yulong’s jaw with what appeared to be main strength, before scraping the muck off of his hand and letting those massive jaws close. For a long moment, Yulong just continued to lie there and breathe.

Then his entire body spasmed, enough to break the ice beneath him completely. Cracks ran through – Tony flailed belatedly, falling back into the water and  _nooo faceplate shitshitshit_ – came up on a broad, shelled back.

The turtle craned its neck back at him, and then over at Steve, who was treading water among the ice nearby, a wave going over his head as Yulong kept thrashing. “It tastes right awful, sadly,” the turtle said loudly, and Yulong’s form vanished beneath the surface. “But he’ll be alright – best cure there is for us freshwater folk – ”

Steve popped up again, shaking water from his head like a dog, spotted them, and began to swim their way. The turtle gently drifted forward, lending him a fin – “He’s _gone_ ,” Steve said wretchedly.

“He’ll be back, he just needs to eat something to get the taste out of his mouth,” the turtle said wisely. “Shall we go pick up your friend?”

Tony glanced across the ice – cracks in it were now reaching to Tripitaka, who was backing away from them but appeared to be unwilling to simply run away.

“Eh,” said Tony, flopping back down. Sitting up was kinda hard, and he wasn’t sure why he was bothering. “He’ll be fine a bit longer.”


	8. The Rope Bridge

“How'd you get here, anyway?” Tony asked after a while.

They’d retrieved Tripitaka and were now all sunning on the bank. This part of the river seemed to have decided that it was summer, not fall – a change that Steve was grateful for, and not just because of the logistics involved. He’d torn off the netting of extremis and tossed it at Tony as soon as he’d realized he could – Tony needed the extra nanites. His armour was banged up, scorched in places, cut open in others, and the way he kept sort of drifting off had Steve more than a little concerned.

“The basket,” Steve replied, flipping it over between his hands and handing it to Tony before he could ask. “The rock you left me at had these... they weren’t _paintings_ – ” but they certainly had been art. He described the scenes, the fish and the basket – “When I pulled it up, I looked back at it and I saw that the fish was tiny again. It had gotten loose, but when it was in the basket it was easy to see it was just a fish.”

“That doesn’t explain how you got here,” said Tony drowsily. He was running his hands over the basket in a semi-aimless fashion, much as Steve would find himself occasionally doing with his shield during downtime.

Steve shrugged helplessly. “I knew I had to put the fish in the basket and then... there I was. I think the basket must have been called to the fish, or something.”

“Mm. Or the rock, and the river,” said Tony. The words slurred faintly together. “Damnit.”

“It sounds like the tale of Kuan-Yin’s koi fish,” said Tripitaka, getting up to pluck the basket from Tony’s grip and examine it himself, before handing it back. Steve had tensed at the movement – but the monk just sat back down again. “It is not a popular tale these days among the Great Temples, but some versions of Tripitaka’s legend tell of how he faced a demon koi fish that had escaped from the Bodhisattva’s koi pond. Only the Bodhisattva’s power could have caught it again; she must have left that basket where she knew you would find it.”

“You’d think she’d have figured out how to keep the fish from escaping after the first time,” said Steve. He’d heard of people being careless about pets, but this pet had _eaten_ people, good Lord. If she’d known where to leave the basket, then surely she’d known what the fish would do. He’d not thought that his opinion of this Kuan-Yin could get much lower after learning that she’d been the one to give Tripitaka that damn headband, but this plumbed new depths. 

“Trials are sent to test us. We learn by experience and pain,” said Tripitaka. But he sounded uncertain, and his eyes were dark and shadowed.

“Or maybe it’s the first time through, for her,” said Tony, spinning the basket lazily. “Steve, this is just a basket. No nanites. No tech – not that I’m seeing.”

“I wish I could’ve brought you a sample of the rock.”

“I wish we could find our way – hmm. Heyyy, turtle!” Tony called, propping himself up on one elbow – still with evident effort. He wasn’t so frighteningly pale as he had been when the basket had called Steve out onto the river ice, but it was obvious that he was still injured. Steve would just have to make sure he kept resting – at least he had a healing factor; _that_ much was well and truly obvious now, if it hadn’t been before. Nothing on the order of what a super-zombie had, but it was definitely there – possibly even stronger than Steve’s own.

The turtle poked his massive head above water and blinked his giant, wrinkled eyes. “Hmm? Oh, yes?”

“Could you find the rock where this came from?” Tony waved the basket.

Squinting, the turtle hauled itself somewhat up onto the bank, until his jaw – which was unnervingly pointy and sharp – was nearly touching the basket. Apparently he was near-sighted. “Oh,” he said apologetically after a moment. “Um. Do you know which rock it came from? There are quite a few.” Buried beneath the apology was an unspoken question regarding the intelligence of somebody who would ask to find a random rock beside a river – particularly _this_ river.

“No,” said Tony, and he tossed the basket back to Steve. “Damn. All those metal plates.”

“At least the arc reactor came with me,” Steve pointed out. And fortunately the arc reactors were water-proof, because Steve’s belt pockets weren’t. But looking at the state of Tony’s armour he couldn’t help but wish as well that he’d been holding onto some of those metal plates – Tony needed all the help with repairs that he could get. Wishing wouldn’t produce them from nowhere, though.

“We’re not going to be able to find the road again, either,” said Tony dreamily.

“What?” said Tripitaka, sounding alarmed.

Steve ignored him and frowned at Tony. “You don’t sound too concerned by that.”

“I think the damage functions have some hook-ins to my emotional subroutines,” Tony confessed. Then, seeing that Steve couldn’t parse this, he added, “I turned off my ability to feel pain, and it’s a lot like being stoned.”

Well, that explained the slurring. And it was a relief, at least, since they didn’t have any painkillers – although if Tony could turn off his own pain, how could the headband - ? It must be some different thing, Steve decided. He just hoped Tony remembered how to turn it back _on_ , later. Steve wasn’t a fan of pain, but Tony already pushed himself too far – without any reminders of his limits, he’d wind up killing himself. And if it affected his 'emotional subroutines' as well...

“How are we to continue our pilgrimage, if we no longer had the road?” said Tripitaka, and if Tony didn’t seem to care, then Tripitaka certainly looked miserable enough to make up for it. Steve wasn’t sure how he felt about it – Tony had just admitted that he was at least half-stoned; he’d probably have a better idea of how to get back on track when he was no longer so foggy. Steve didn’t like the delay, but – Tony had relaxed from his constant paranoia in order to kill his own pain: he clearly wasn’t in any condition to push onward at the moment.

“If you mean the great road, then I can take you _there_ ,” said the turtle, flipping a fin at Tripitaka in a manner that was somehow calming. “It’s the least I can do, really. That awful fish had come down and taken over my home, driven me out, wrecked the family shrine – you’ve gotten rid of him, and so I owe you a great debt.”

“Oh, no,” said Tripitaka, eyes brightening for the first time since they’d set foot in that awful temple. “If you can take us back to the road, then it is we who are in _your_ debt. If there is anything we can do for you, please let me know.”

...which was a bit more than Steve would have agreed to. He bit his tongue.

The turtle eyed Tripitaka skeptically, and squintily. Steve felt half-inclined to offer to send him a pair of custom-made glasses once they got back to Earth. “You are called Tripitaka, are you not? No, I shan’t take any promises from you. The last time a man named Tripitaka promised me anything, he quite forgot within a few days, and there I was, left to swim about as a turtle for another thousand years.” The turtle harrumphed. “Funnily enough, there was a koi fish involved that time, too...”

Tripitaka reeled back, looking amazed and disappointed all at once. “You met my namesake?”

“Yes, and as I said, he wasn’t any good for his word,” said the turtle; Tripitaka looked crushed. “But that’s all very well; my house is worth a bit of a trip. I can carry you on my back easily – well, except perhaps for your dragon friend, but he’ll be fine to swim by himself.”

“Wait,” said Tony. “Wait? That’s not gonna work. You can’t have somebody else carry you – y'need to travel the road yourself.”

“I’m a turtle,” said the turtle. “I don’t count as a somebody for the road’s purposes.”

Tony squinted back at him. “That seems kinda racist.”

“It’s the way of the world,” said the turtle. “If you’ll take a piece of advice – don’t object too much, or you might end up a turtle yourself in your next life. Here’s your friend now.”

Some hundred yards out from the shore, Yulong burst free from the water, arcing into the air. His scales shimmered now in the sunlight, their lustre fully restored – his fins lethal, sharp, and intact. The terrible wound from the trident was fully healed, and he coiled around, diving beneath the surface and then up again, flashing in and out, a joyous celebration of movement.

“Water dragons,” said the turtle. It might have been a condemnation; or perhaps not. He sounded a bit sad.

 

 

Aside from the metal plates, they’d lost all of their gear that Yulong had been carrying, too, of course. The turtle came up with some riverweed pouches from his house, but it was clear before they’d been in the air for more than a half-hour that the things were good for nothing but disintegrating once they dried out.

“Oh, dear,” said the turtle. He was carrying them upriver at a fast clip. Yulong kept pace alongside, occasionally swimming further off to perform more aquatic stunts. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“We’ll make do,” Steve assured him. “We appreciate the thought.”

“You’re almost to Maklu, that’s something.” The turtle craned his neck out as far as he could and bobbed it in the general westerly direction. “Why, some pilgrims I’ve seen cross this river have argued that Maklu starts so near as the west bank: the lower reaches, before the true Divinity of Heaven, perhaps, but a part of it all the same. But it doesn’t seem fair to count it like that – none of the pilgrims ever stop at the west bank, so it can’t be what they came for. No, true Maklu lies beyond the last river.”

“No more rivers,” said Tony. He sounded a bit muffled; there was metal... _growing_ over his face. “I’ve had enough.”

“Rivers are places of crossing,” said the turtle. “What did you expect on a journey to Heaven?”

“He’s got a point,” Steve told Tony.

“Nn... heaven’s a state of mind.”

At the edge of his vision, he saw Tripitaka raise his head, looking started – and then broody again. Steve shifted his foot to nudge Tony’s ankle – gently. From the sound of his voice, he was still half-drugged.

Somehow, it was easier to think of it as a drug, and not as his friend turning a part of his _brain_ off. What if he turned off the part of his brain that let him evaluate decisions properly? His emotions? His ability to empathize? Not even on purpose – but if Tony was turning _off_ parts of his brain, what were the odds that he might slip and make a mistake? That he might turn off the ability to feel _anything_ seemed all too possible – he’d already clearly affected his ability to think, to feel. He didn’t have a soul – although Steve wasn’t sure how much that mattered. Souls were _real_ , but what did they _do_? JARVIS was a person; Tony was still a person. A soul had to do _something_ – it could make a person crazy – but he didn’t know what or how.

He’d believed once that souls were what went to Heaven, but then, he’d also once believed in the Bible’s god. Now he _knew_ that god was real, and didn’t have any faith in him in particular at all. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t a greater God out there, a greater Good which might be reached through the best tenets espoused by the Bible – but souls? Where did they come in? Aside from not being able to travel by soul to the underworld –

“Hang on,” said Steve. “You’re going to be able to enter Maklu, right?”

“Eh?”

“You don’t have a soul.”

Beneath them, the turtle snorted water out its nose. “Ah, that explains why you’re so heavy. All out of proportion, you are.”

“No, that’s because by mass I’m mostly metal,” said Tony. “Denser than your average guy.” He grinned dopily. “No jokes, Steve.”

“Not being able to get into Maklu isn’t a joke.”

“It may indeed cause problems,” agreed Tripitaka gravely, sitting forward. “Entering Maklu is a spiritual, holy event. Perhaps, under my name, you will be allowed anyway...”

“We’ll cross that river when we come to it,” said Tony, seeming to sober up a bit. “Literally. If all else fails – well, you can present our case, Steve.”

“I said it before and I’ll say it again, Tony – splitting up is a bad idea.”

“Hey, I didn’t say I liked it, either. But it’s an option.”

 

 

The sun was just setting by the time Steve spotted the gleam of the road off in the distance. The sky was a brilliant vermillion at the western horizon, playing off of a few low clouds to create a fantastical show of light and shadow. At this angle, it turned the road itself a cherry hue, so that Steve didn’t recognize it for a moment until his brain finished compensating for the shade.

“Almost there,” he told Tony, who had flopped back down on the turtle’s back and dozed most of the trip. From the sound of his breathing, though, he was at least semi-awake at the moment. It was the longest that Steve had seen him sleep since – well, since ever.

That was a weird thought.

“Great,” said Tony with a yawn. Still on his ‘painkillers’, then – as if the fact that he’d been sleeping all day wasn’t enough to make that obvious.

The turtle waddled awkwardly up onto the bank, right beside the road, and let them off – Steve jumped down, while Tripitaka and Tony both slid down the curve of his shell like it was a slide. “Will you be alright here?” the turtle asked politely.

Behind him, Yulong roared and dove deep one last time – and then came cantering out of the river in his horse-form, water streaming from his flanks. He lifted his head to the sky and let out a sound more like a scream than a neigh – but it was triumphant. Apparently, his time as a dragon had done him good.

“I think we’ll be fine,” said Steve.

“Well, if you’re in need on the way back, stand by the river and call,” said the turtle. “I’ll come and give you a lift.” He hesitated. “If, in Heaven, perchance...”

“Yes?” Steve asked after a moment, when the turtle did not continue.

The turtle bobbed his massive head toward Tripitaka – an assessing, impressive stare. Tripitaka shrank before it, and then puffed up a bit again. Perhaps remembering that the turtle had maligned the original Tripitaka, Steve thought.

“Since I don’t know what answers Heaven might bring, I won’t make promises,” said Tripitaka. “And even if I did... I don’t know I’d be able to fulfill it anyway. It might be an evil to break a promise, but unless what you might ask is of paramount importance, there are so many greater evils out there in the world. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have offered service to you.” 

“My home is worth more to me than any trivial matter I might desire to know,” said the turtle, but he sounded approving. With a ponderous motion, he hauled himself back toward the water – once in, he was a far smoother swimmer than he was moving about on land. He turned his massive head back downriver, and between one instant and the next, he vanished – not as if going underwater, but as if he had gone... somewhere rather further.

 _“Right,”_ said Tony. _“Note to everyone – no swimming. Also, probably not a good idea to drink the water.”_

“We _are_ going to need water,” said Steve, eyeing Tripitaka – and Yulong – doubtfully. What were the odds that Tripitaka could stay on bare-back? Better than the odds he wouldn’t complain about it, Steve supposed, and then immediately felt ashamed of his own lack of charity, and then _angry_ at feeling ashamed – _enough_ , he told himself. Logistics. Tripitaka would have to tough out the lack of a saddle, just as Steve was going to have to tough out the lack of food for a while longer. His stomach rumbled. They probably should have asked the turtle if he had any to share – but the riverweed, while tough, didn’t seem edible by humans, and after dealing with the koi fish, the thought of eating _fish_ was nauseating.

Tony let out an exaggerated sigh. _“If we don’t find a better source a day out, we can come back. Hell, I can make the trip a lot quicker than that, no need for all of us to backtrack.”_

That was a point, but – splitting up was still a bad idea. Especially since... “Take off your helmet,” Steve told him.

The helmet dissolved, and Tony tilted his head to the side, one eyebrow raised ever-so-slightly. His eyes still lacked their usual focus. Yeah, splitting up was an _especially_ bad idea right now.

“If you can’t run – or _stand_ – without being drugged, then we’re not going anywhere tonight.”

Tony rolled his eyes and huffed, “Fine,” – and buckled to one knee. His eyes went wide – and then narrowed, an attempt at normalcy that left him squinting; perspiration dotted his forehead.

“Jesus, Tony, turn it back on,” Steve said, hurrying over to support him. “Or off. Or whatever. We’re staying.”

“It’s fine,” Tony said immediately, waving him off. It would have been more convincing if Steve hadn’t been able to see the stress lines in his jaw. “Fine. All the major damage is taken care of – it’s like paper cuts, Steve, it’s the little stuff that hurts like a son of a bitch, it’s no big deal.”

Tripitaka shifted – ever-aware of him, Steve tensed, but the monk didn’t say anything. Hopefully he _wouldn’t_ say anything. Even if Tripitaka was showing signs of _not_ being a bullying little creep... he had no right to say anything to or go anywhere near Tony.

“We’re staying,” Steve said firmly, keeping Tony from standing by dint of refusing to move his hand on Tony’s shoulder. “We wouldn’t make it far before dark anyway.”

“I have a headlight built into my chest, Cap,” Tony sighed, but his eyes had softened out again. “And _it’s_ working just fine.”

“Great. Give the rest of yourself enough time to be fine, too.”

Making camp was short work, mostly because there was nothing much to easily make camp _with_ ; fortunately, it promised to be a pleasantly warm night. There was no food – without the turtle, even Yulong didn’t seem to want to go near the water to try to fish. At least firewood was easy to find, despite Steve being loath to let the road out of sight. The banks of the river might really have been the shores of a sea for all the driftwood that washed up. And with Tony around he never had to worry about having matches or a lighter – or even flint and steel – to get a fire going.

They could have used the time to get closer to Maklu – heck, maybe if they’d pressed on, they might’ve already been there. They didn’t know how much further it was, but it couldn’t be that far. Yet Steve couldn’t find it within himself to regret the decision, since he soon as he got back with the firewood, Tony rolled over and went to sleep – and this despite how he’d dozed for half the day. He could say he was ‘fine’ all he wanted, but he clearly needed the rest. Maybe in Maklu they’d have the sort of science that could heal injuries as if by magic – or maybe they’d get a cold welcome. They needed to be ready.

And he was glad that Tony had the chance to sleep.

It was a mostly cloudless sky; overhead, the stars gleamed with enough light that the banked fire was more a hindrance to his vision than a help. There was no moon – he hadn’t seen one in the entire time they’d been here. There were none of the constellations he’d learned back in the War, and instead of the Milky Way there were two bright, hazy lines spread across from horizon to horizon, meeting somewhere below the world’s curve. It was beautiful – but he missed the streetlights of New York, the blazing neon signs and backlit ads.

Sometimes on nights like these, back in the War, when they’d make camp – sometimes with a fire, often without – they’d stay up, chatting about what they were going to do when they got home. Steve had always ended up with more than his fair share of blushes – the boys were shameless in teasing him. But he’d always enjoyed those nights all the same, the shared dreams.

It wasn’t something he could indulge in now. Even if Tony had been awake... there wasn’t going to be a welcome home waiting for him. _If_ Tony came home at all – he was _planning_ to go on to Asgard, to do something that was possibly phenomenally stupid, and almost certainly suicidal.

Was Steve just going to _let_ him?

Staring into the fire was killing his night-vision. Steve kept on anyway; his hearing would provide better warning of any approaching threat, and he didn’t want to look at the sky.

 

 

By noon the next day, Steve’s stomach was starting to gnaw inwards on itself. He ignored it with the skill of an orphan from the Great Depression – and as long as he didn’t start feeling the light-headedness that signalled that his metabolism had started panicking, he could keep on ignoring. That didn’t mean he had to like it, though, and at every faint curve in the road he kept finding himself looking around hopefully for new signs of human life. The one farmhouse they’d seen around midmorning had been abandoned, and the fields around it long overgrown, with plants that Steve didn’t even recognize, let alone have the first idea of whether or not they were safe to eat. (Tripitaka was no help.) True, with the serum it was pretty hard to poison him, but he wasn’t yet _that_ desperate.

“We are going to starve,” Tripitaka predicted moodily.

 _“There’s water ahead,”_ Tony reported. Steve couldn’t hear it yet – but Tony had the suit. And the faceplate firmly closed, as it had been since he’d turned off the pain-suppressant this morning. _“No people. Maybe this one’ll be safe to drink... less disposed toward fish-monsters...”_

Steve made a face. They’d all drunk from the river before leaving – well, all of them except Tony – but the water, even as much as he needed it with the day’s sun, still felt like it sat heavily in his gut. Maybe it really _was_ that much heavier – Tony had said there were a lot of nanites in it, but he hadn’t specified how many.

On the other hand, that had been this morning; he was thirsty _now_. And hungry. And by God, he hoped that there would be fish that would be safe to eat – at least cooking would probably make them saf _er_. Right? ...Maybe?

He might have to consider vegetarianism when he got back. The nuns at the orphanage – who’d have rapped his knuckles if he ever looked anything less than grateful for the food they put on the table, although Steve never had been – would have been horrified. His mother might not have; she’d scrimped and saved and put every ounce of herself into trying to raise him right, and if it had wounded her deep into the soul that she’d never been able to feed him as well as a richer mother might’ve, he rather thought she’d have understood that he just couldn’t take the chance he was eating something, some _one_ , that could think for itself, or had been able to think for itself, or _might_ be able to think for itself.

 _That’s not going to happen on Earth, Rogers,_ he reminded himself sharply, trying to cut himself off before he worked himself into a foul mood based on a situation that was highly unlikely. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the nagging thoughts.

 _“You okay?”_ Tony asked over the comm.

“Fine.”

A pause. _“...is that the kind of ‘fine’ that you seem to think I mean when I say I’m fine?”_

What was that supposed to mean? “No, actually fine,” said Steve. “Though I could use a drink.”

 _“Couldn’t we all,”_ Tony laughed, and if there was a blacker edge to it than Steve liked – well.

Damn it.

It was about five more minutes before they came to the river. It was a decent-sized river – maybe sixty yards across, flowing swift, contained within rocky banks on either side – but compared to the previous one, it was little more than a creek. No, the ominous feeling that seemed to dim the day’s bright sunlight wasn’t because of the river.

The road had ended.

They’d crossed rivers before. Usually, there had been bridges over; occasionally, when the water was shallow, the road ran under and came back out on the other side – the last river had just been a more... extreme example of that. It was clearly not the case here. They all slowed, wordless, as they reached the end: the white stone narrowed, then cut off entirely, and capping the end was a ribbon of gold about a foot wide, stamped with a series of characters that Steve had no hope of reading.

“Ah,” said Tripitaka, peering down at it with reverence and wonder, and then out at the river. “This is the Bridge to Heaven.”

Steve followed his gaze, but he didn’t see anything more than he had the first time: no bridge. There was a rope line tied across it, strung tense from two pitons hammered into either side of the shore, like one might use to pull a ferry across – but he couldn’t see an actual ferry. Maybe on the other side? He couldn’t see one over there, either, but there was fairly dense brush around the space for a road – space, because there was no actual road, not as he’d come to think of it in the past few weeks.

 _When had that happened?_ he wondered. There was a _dirt_ road on the other side, but it felt like his brain was trying to skitter away associating it with the word. That was... really disturbing.

And not something he could do about right now. “Is there anyone over on the other side of the river?” he asked Tony. “We’re gonna need a ferry – I don’t like the idea of trying to swim this.” Considering the _last_ river, that would have to be an absolute last resort.

“There is no ferry,” said Tripitaka serenely. “This is the Last Bridge.”

Tony was standing as still as a statue – more still than any un-armoured human could ever stand. _“Sensors aren’t picking anything up,”_ he said slowly.

“Damn it,” Steve muttered. And then, reluctantly, because he didn’t want to be splitting up, either – “I can run across the rope and take a look,” he suggested, stepping forward and testing the rope with his weight. It was strung tight enough that it barely dipped. If they did have to get across on the rope – well, he could probably help Tripitaka, and with extremis Tony probably had good enough balance to be fine on his own. But how were they going to get Yulong across? He glanced worriedly at the dragon-horse and was met with a placid gaze.

Tony grabbed him by the arm. _“I meant I can’t pick up anything._ Anything _. I can’t see what’s on the other side – what are you seeing?”_

Oh. 

“More of what’s on this side,” Steve reported. “But no road.” He searched Tony’s faceplate, ridiculous as it was to try to see anything there. “If you can’t cross – ”

“No soul,” murmured Tripitaka. “He shall have to stay behind.” He spread his hands apologetically. 

 _“Let’s not jump to conclusions,”_ said Tony. _“What if there’s_ actually _nothing there? I’m not the one who was fooled by illusions.”_

And they’d all paid for not believing him – but Steve, Tripitaka and Yulong had paid only lightly. Steve looked back at the rope. Then he scrounged up a rock, throwing it to the other side – it cleared the river easily, and bounced off to rest somewhere among the trees and undergrowth on the other side. “What’d you see?”

_“Vanished mid-way.”_

“If you cannot see it, then that is most certainly because you don’t have a soul,” said Tripitaka, making motions to scramble down from Yulong’s back; Yulong snorted and lowered himself to his knees before Tripitaka could fall and probably injure himself in the attempt. “Maklu lies upon the other side of that bridge, so we must cross. _I_ must cross. Heaven no doubt knows that the rest of you deserve to cross, even if you are not perhaps at the stage where you can,” his eyes lingered on Tony, and Steve sort of wanted to punch him for the look of _regret_ that he had the gall to wear, “But your final enlightenment must ultimately be up to you. For my part,” he bit his lip, “I must cross.”

Steve looked to Tony. “We don’t really have a choice.”

_“I hate gods. And magic.”_

There was nothing else for it. Tripitaka had no sense of balance whatsoever; if he was going to get across, Steve would have to help him, and before he did that, he wanted to make sure there wasn’t some trap on the other side. “Wish me luck,” he told Tony, and ran out across the rope.

It didn’t suddenly snap in the middle and dump him into the river. In fact, given how steady it was beneath his feet, even with the light wind, he began to feel a bit more confident about getting Tripitaka across without a dunking. On the other side, the dirt road led off into the hills. It was clearer from here: Steve could see what looked like a farmhouse tucked not-quite-out-of-sight behind a rise, and there were settled fields, although he couldn’t have said how he’d missed them from the eastern side of the river. No doubt more magic. But there didn’t seem to be anything threatening over on this side, either.

He walked back, taking his time about it – enough time to let himself bounce up and down on the rope a bit, and to lean over and try to peer into the river. The water was pretty clear, but deep enough that he couldn’t see its depths in the middle; and the current looked strong enough to reconfirm his earlier opinion on not wanting to fish anybody out of it. Back on Earth it might have merely been unpleasant – but not a challenge for a supersoldier and Iron Man. Here, where the river might wash them across space-time... not so much.

Although the road was no longer here. That was a thought. He walked back the rest of the way, to where the others were waiting for him. “If the road’s not here, can we carry them across?” he asked Tony, tilting his head to Yulong and Tripitaka.

Yulong snorted; Tripitaka looked severe. “One must walk the last bridge,” the monk proclaimed.

Tony held up his hands. _“Don’t ask me,”_ he said peevishly, _“I can’t even see the other damn side.”_

Point. Damn. “Alright,” Steve said reluctantly. “I’ll bring Tripitaka across first. You bring Yulong across after we’re over – Yulong can tell you when,” he pre-empted the obvious objection.

Yulong didn’t seem thrilled about this; he snorted and pawed at the ground nervously. Steve snorted right back at him; if he didn’t want to turn back, then he’d just have to tough it out.

Backing onto the rope – barely a foot over – Steve extended one hand – and then, reluctantly, the other as well, because as much as he disliked Tripitaka he couldn’t think, anymore, that Tripitaka deserved to simply fall in and drown. He couldn’t say he _liked_ it, but – damn it, it was what it was. Nothing was clear-cut anymore, and Steve wasn’t judge or jury.

“Hang on to my hands,” he instructed. “I won’t let you fall.”

Obviously nervous, Tripitaka grabbed on tightly – tightly by his standards anyway; not so much for Steve. That was fine. They edged out onto the rope, Steve not needing to see where to place his feet to keep his balance, but Tripitaka acting as if he walked a razor-thin wire that might vanish from beneath him at any moment. His obvious fear – and determination to keep going anyway – was almost enough for sympathy.

 _Was_ enough for sympathy. Steve almost stopped their painfully slow progress as he recognized the emotion. Oh, God, when had the thought of sympathy become so revolting? What the Hell was he _thinking_?

“Ow,” said Tripitaka weakly, and Steve realized that he was holding on far too tightly.

He loosened his grip back to something more human – and something like a gust of wind shoved against the monk. Steve barely felt it, except at his hands, but it plucked Tripitaka from his grasp like it was nothing – just _took_ him, dropping him into the water. Tripitaka flailed, his clothes dragging him down, and gasped out something that might have been a cry for help –

Steve was already diving into the water, but Tripitaka slipped beneath the surface while he was still in the air; he was aware, briefly, that Tony had taken to the air and was rocketing towards them, and then his head was underwater and for a moment it was all he could do to shove away the memories. Then control resumed, and he could kick his legs and swim. He dove deeper, struggling to see about – there. Carried downriver by the current, Tripitaka had gotten caught on something – or Steve thought it was Tripitaka; underwater was blurry. It was something moving and thrashing, though – Steve propelled his way towards him, just as the thrashing stopped, and got there in time to see the monk go still.

He grabbed Tripitaka by the back of his robes and hauled him upward, propelling him up and tilting the monk’s head back as soon as they hit the surface. No good; Tripitaka wasn’t breathing. They were closer to the western bank now, much closer, so that was the way he swam, slinging the unmoving form over his shoulder and scrambling up the rocks – and coming face-to-face with Tripitaka, alive and well and beaming at him.

“What the Hell,” Steve managed, depositing the body on the ground and checking. It was also Tripitaka.

“It is the Last Bridge,” said Tripitaka serenely, blissfully. “It strips away mortal weight and mortal sins; look! I may run across it as I please, now,” and he demonstrated that he could do just that, touching down on the far shore – Yulong’s neigh carried across the water – before running back.

Steve looked back down at the body. He should have already started CPR, he thought weakly. He should have – Tripitaka arrived back in front of him. “It’s your _body_.”

“But I am not in it, anymore,” Tripitaka pointed out. His voice was gentle. “You may throw it back, Steve Rogers. It was a good house for my soul, but it is now an empty house; let my flesh return to the world. I have transcended it, as you can see.”

His soul.

Steve looked up at the opposite bank, horror stealing over him.

 _Tony_.

He dove for the river again – the water closing over his head this time didn’t phase him; he was too busy cursing himself for not seeing it earlier. Tony had flown out to help – he wasn’t on the other shore anymore – he must have entered the river, and Tripitaka had drowned in about ten seconds, which had to be something of a record. He shouldn’t have been dead that fast, unless the river had killed him. His soul had come walking out the other side, but Tony didn’t _have_ a soul or an immortality curse either, and if the water killed –

 _You’re dead!_ a small part of him started clamouring. There wasn’t much room for it, because he had a soul and was clearly still here, but _Tony_ – he couldn’t see the armour anywhere. It was too dark, not enough light penetrating the depths – he couldn’t catch any sign of the tell-tale gleam. He had to surface for air.

“Steve!” Tripitaka called from the shore, and Steve paused just long enough to see what he’d wanted. If he’d caught sight of something – “He went in; he is dead. There’s – ”

Steve didn’t wait to hear the rest. He dove again, hauling himself against the stream this time, closer to the center, trying to make some sort of grid pattern out of it. The armour was metal, Tony was mostly metal – he’d sink pretty fast, right? So he might be further upstream than Tripitaka had been. On the other hand, he was far less a pathetic swimmer than Tripitaka, and had been _looking_ for Tripitaka – Steve came up for air and dove again as soon as his lungs were full.

They had not come so far for Tony to die like this.

They hadn’t come so far for Tony to die at all.

Downstream again – on the eastern side of center – and there: an unmoving blob among other unmoving blobs, but the colour was not quite _right_ , and as he rapidly came closer the shape became clear; Steve angled downward, ignoring the pressure in his ears, and snagged one unmoving metal arm. It was the river. It had to be the river. Tony’s suit was water-sealed – he had to get him up. He angled for shore again – but surfacing, and pulling Tony’s head above water, he realized he must have gotten flipped around: they were back closer to the western bank again. Steve didn’t care; Tony’s dead weight was a lot more than Tripitaka’s had been, but it was all immaterial compared to his friend, whose face he couldn’t see, who was as unmoving as a statue.

He slammed his palm down on the breastplate of the armour. “Tony, open up.” No response. No sign of life at all. “Tony!”

There was movement in his peripheral vision, and shadows fell over him. Tripitaka – and Yulong; how had Yulong gotten across? Steve didn’t care.

“He is gone,” Tripitaka was saying, and Steve really didn’t give a damn. “I’m sorry, Steve. I should have ordered him to stay behind – but I couldn’t, not that way. Not now that I know... knew....”

Steve tugged a glove off with his teeth, the other hand pulling his shield from his back, and ran his bare fingers along the sides of Tony’s helmet and faceplate. Thor had been able to rip away the faceplate by brute strength, but Steve wasn’t that strong. He couldn’t find any sort of catch, not that he’d really been expecting to. But the shield could cut through... he just had to be damn careful not to hurt Tony in the process. Yet it was easy to picture Tony beneath the armour – easy enough to imagine where the armour ended and skin began – he pinned Tony’s head with a knee, fixing his mental image of Tony in his mind, and brought his shield down at the side of Tony’s chin – a perfect strike. Nanites gave beneath a vibranium edge. He repeated the process on the other side, and then higher up on both sides of Tony’s face; the nanites the shield tore away made no move to re-attach themselves. They were as still as Tony was.

Praying it was enough, Steve hooked his fingers into the weakened points in the armour and pulled. It was a lot like trying to open one of SHIELD’s vault doors – except harder. He put more effort into it, and the faceplate ripped free.

He didn’t toss it aside like Thor had. Tony probably would need the nanites. He let it clang down beside them instead, leaning over to try to feel for a pulse, to listen for breathing – no breathing.

CPR, then. Two breaths, and compressions, which he shouldn’t have been able to manage with Tony in the armour. The chest plate gave way beneath his hands far too easily. But Tony had extremis. It would heal him from this. It had healed him from yesterday’s fight, and he’d been badly beaten up after that; it had healed him up from when Tony had said he’d been dying. Tony had just been exposed to the water through the armour – he hadn’t had his head blown to pieces, or his brains scrambled, and nothing short of that could kill an extremis-infected zombie. So if he just had time to heal – oxygen circulation was important; brain damage would set in otherwise. Steve just had to give him that time –

Breaths. 

Compressions.

Five sets. Then check. No breathing.

Repeat.

Then check.

Repeat.

Then check. 

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat. 

Check –

Tony was breathing.

Steve fumbled for a pulse – found one, shaky but there. Or maybe it was just him who felt shaky. Light-headed. Oh, God. Oh, Lord.

Tripitaka and Yulong had fallen silent somewhere around the tenth repeat. Now Tripitaka spoke again. “He lives; a mortal body upon Heavenly soil. I wonder what you have done, Steve Rogers.”

Saved his best friend.

Steve felt himself slump; let his head tilt down until his forehead clanged against the breastplate of the armour. His fingers he kept hovering over Tony’s face, to feel each slow breath in and out.

_Oh, thank You, God._

But he wasn’t waking up.

“Wake up,” Steve muttered at Tony. His quick-drying uniform had reached that irritating damp stage of not-quite clinging to his skin; apparently even miracle technology couldn’t skip that part. The river water felt like oil, felt like a stain against him.

He was so thirsty.

“Steve, he is mortal. His consciousness...”

“You don’t actually know a damn thing about what’s going on; you can keep your mouth shut,” Steve snapped at Tripitaka, and shut his mouth with a click. It took effort not to say more. He glanced down at his hands.

If he, too, was dead – if Steve was now ‘just’ a soul – then what were the odds that he’d be able to get the cure they found in Maklu back to Earth? Tony had to wake up.

“Perhaps you would know,” said Tripitaka, which wasn’t shutting up. “You underwent the transformation before; I had not realized. Although it does not seem to have granted you much serenity.”

“What?”

Tripitaka regarded him almost fondly; Steve half-shook with revulsion for his pity. Revulsion, and everything else, because loathing alone could not have moved him so. “You crossed the river without being swept clean by its waters.”

Steve took a deep breath. It was true – Steve didn’t have a clue what it meant, but it was true that he didn’t feel any different. So maybe that meant that he could, in fact, return to Earth. And so would Tony. He got one foot under him, then grabbed Tony’s arm and hauled him up into a fireman’s carry, standing at the same time. It would slow them down – or. He started toward Yulong. “You can keep him from falling off, right?” he asked the dragon-horse.

Yulong snorted and rolled his eyes as if insulted – and then dropped his head a bit, giving Steve a look usually associated more with sad puppies than six-legged horses. Steve glared back at him, and settled Tony over Yulong’s broad back.

“The White Tiger warned us of him,” said Tripitaka. “This is unwise.”

Steve planted himself between Tony and Tripitaka. “We are not leaving him.” Could Tony feel pain, right now, if Tripitaka decided to torture him? Steve held his breath. Tripitaka – his body was _dead_ , but his soul was here... his self? Was it really his soul? Looking at him wasn’t anything like when Steve had had the soul gem. If it _was_ his soul, did that make him indestructible, or, for the first time, truly vulnerable? Was he really dead, or was ‘transcending’ different? – because Steve was pretty sure _he_ hadn’t previously died at any point, seventy years of being frozen notwithstanding. Mostly sure. Yet, if Steve could, finally, _stop_ Tripitaka – no, he needed to not think like that right now. There were too many things that might go wrong, and the worst case – he couldn’t risk the worst case. He couldn’t threaten Tony with that. He needed to wait, and learn more – and that meant they had to keep going.

If Tripitaka would let him. Them.

“Steve,” said Tripitaka gently. “I would not hurt him. Not – ” he closed his eyes. “This is unwise. But I would not hurt him. I have been choosing between evils for so long that my soul was stained with them, but that stain has been washed free, and I can see now... I think I finally understand what the Great Sages speak of. Any choice of evil will undermine the Great Harmony; there is no such thing as a lesser evil.”

Steve stared at him. His insides felt hollowed out, his head dull, and Tripitaka was expounding philosophy. They needed to be moving. He turned toward the dirt... road leading further west.

“There are other advantages of transcendence,” said Tripitaka, smiling – still gentle, which seemed all the more _wrong._ “I shall walk with you from here. The cares of my body have been washed away and I do not think I shall slow our pace overmuch.”

And that was that.

 

 

Seven hours later, the sun had set, and Tony still hadn’t woken up.


	9. The Shattered City

The farmhouse that Steve had spotted was a gutted ruin – and not from the slow decay of time, either. Half of it had been burnt down, although the ashes had long since gone cold and started to scatter. The fields were a mess, fought on and bled on and the crops ground into the soil – not quite as bad as some as some that Steve had seen in the War, but. Bad enough.

There were no bodies anywhere to be found.

“Something terrible is happening here, Steve,” said Tripitaka, with a meaningful glance at Tony.

Steve ignored him, focusing on searching the remains of the house instead – but even the part that was still standing had been hollowed out by the fire. It was the outline of a structure, nothing more. Like in the fields, there were no bodies, no discarded weapons... no personal effects, either. Hopefully the occupants had had time to flee before a battle had been fought across their land. There was no way to know, not without abandoning their primary mission.

There was a well near the farmhouse, but the water at the bottom was an unhealthy greenish colour. Steve licked cracked lips and glanced at the sky – still no clouds except at the horizon, and those were faint and white, not rain-clouds.

“We keep going,” Steve said, and they did.

It was slow going. Not just because of Tripitaka, although he didn’t slow them down as much as Steve had expected. But the road – and it was still hard to think of it like that – was a far cry from _the_ road. In places it was clear that masses of people had used it for some time, and slogged the entire thing to mud and uneven footing – walking through the grass beside it would have been much easier, but given the nature of roads in this world, Steve was afraid to try. True, it might not be the great white road made of technology that could bend space-time, but the masses of people that had been travelling... their tracks would peter out, suddenly, without sign of where they had all gone, where they had _left_ the road. It seemed like a pretty good clue that something was still hinky.

And then they stumbled across the monastery.

The first clue was the smoke in the distance, winding its way into the air. The need to get off the road, to find cover, was now almost a physical itch; Steve struggled to push it away. He was glad that Tripitaka had volunteered to run – because even if he hadn’t, Steve wouldn’t have been able to carry him: he needed to be free and ready to react.

When they rounded a boulder and got a good sight of what lay before them, Steve halted them at once, dragging Tripitaka physically back out of sight – Yulong, at least, had the sense to hide on his own. “Stay here,” Steve ordered them – feeling like a hypocrite, but what could he do? Yulong and Tripitaka – even if the latter was suddenly no longer tripping over his own feet – were not exactly made for ‘subtle’.

He wished badly that Tony were awake.

Since it _was_ now in sight, Steve left the road, sticking to the brush as he circled around, keeping the ruined monastery in view. The ashes at the farmhouse had been cold – but this was still burning, one last silken wall yet refusing to die. The other walls, except for those made of stone, had already fallen; the roof had collapsed in as well. Whatever the silk stuff really was, it let off a foul grey smoke, making his nose twitch.

He listened. Over the occasional hiss from the still-burning flames, and the light wind brushing against trees, brush, and ruins, he couldn’t hear any sounds that would speak of enemies still being about. Not that he knew who the enemies here were – on Earth, Steve would have condemned anybody willing to attack a monastery – and from the layout of the remaining walls, so similar to the one they’d stayed at before, Steve _knew_ that was what it was – but, Hell, despite the welcome of the one monastery they’d come across, he believed Tripitaka when he said that many temples in this land were unfriendly, at best.  

 _Wait – there._ The wind lulled, and Steve’s ears caught a faint hitch in breathing coming from somewhere among the ruins – faint, but laboured. Not a threat. He took another careful scan and then darted out of his hiding place – keeping eyes and ears peeled all the while, shield ready: movement attracted attention. But none came. He made it to the ruins – the awful smoke was thicker here, almost choking, and making him almost wish he had a full mask like Tony’s. And beneath it... beneath it was the unmistakable smell of death.

There were bodies here, inside the walls – men and women, mostly looking human, a few not quite. He could not say what had killed them; there was no wound he could easily see on any of them. There were not many – six in all, before he came across source of the breathing that he could still just faintly pick out.

The monk was lying beside what had been a garden – had been, but now the beds had been trampled over, destroyed. She was curled inward on herself, clutching her hands against her chest, her eyes wide and frightened – and when Steve stepped into her line of vision, she gave a hoarse, quiet cry. Fear.

“I’m a friend,” Steve said immediately, holding his hands wide apart. She wasn’t armed – not that he’d been able to see – none of the monks had been. Which maybe meant nothing, but he _couldn’t_ assume it did. “I’m not with whoever did this – I can help you. Are you injured?”

He stepped nearer, and she curled even more toward the floor. “Don’t touch me!”

“Okay,” Steve said, making his voice as mild as he possibly could. He stopped. “Okay, I’m not going to touch you. I’m not going to hurt you. They’re gone – you’re safe – ”

“I’m dying, you idiot,” the monk wheezed, and squeezed her eyes shut tight – from fear or pain, Steve couldn’t tell. “If you touch me, it’ll – jump to you.”

Steve closed his own eyes, listening to the wheeze – it was a full crackle, now. Fluid in the lungs. He knelt down and looked at her as best he could without getting closer – blunt force trauma? There was no blood. If it was an infection – but what sort of disease worked so fast? And this did: the monks, including her, had been left lying where they’d fallen. Not to mention all the other signs.

“Who did this to you?”

“You don’t know?” Her eyes opened to slits. “Of course – you’re a pilgrim.” She laughed, a horrible rattling thing that nearly started her coughing; from his own experience, Steve wasn’t sure how she managed to avoid it. “The Titan’s troops. You picked a – bad time to visit.”

The Titan. Not a title he’d heard before – but according to Thor, Loki wasn’t Asgardian by birth. He was a frost- _giant_.

Loki had done this.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

“That’s – my apology... things are probably – bad...” she seemed to lose track of what she was saying and just laid there for a moment, struggling to breathe. “Bad where you – come from? We’ve failed you. All of you.”

He remembered the Chief Magistrate’s promise. Her power – her dedication. “It’s not your fault,” he told the monk.

“We’re failing.” Her eyes tracked to his. “Don’t touch me – us. Bodies.”

“I won’t.”

“Go home.”

“I can’t.”

“Idiot,” she wheezed. “This isn’t – your mortal Empire. This is Maklu. The cycle is not like – you know it. If you die...”

“I know,” he said, to spare her the breath. “I’m from a different world.”

She glanced up at him – hate and fear and –

“I’m not one of the Titan’s troops,” Steve promised. “And I’ll oppose him to the death.”

Her mouth twitched – a smile, tiny and pressed with pain. “So would – we all,” she managed, and died.

Her eyes were still open. Steve wanted to close them – to offer that much dignity, even if he knew none of her funeral rites, and couldn’t afford the time to bury her – to bury them all. Instead he stood and bowed his head to her, all the final respect he could offer her.

“May whatever greater Good is out there, enfold you in Its embrace,” he murmured, and headed back.

Yulong and Tripitaka were waiting for him anxiously. Steve checked on Tony first – he was still unconscious, but he was still breathing – and gestured them grimly onward. “No one out in front,” he muttered. “We keep moving.”

“There were no survivors?” Tripitaka asked in a small voice.

“No.” He locked eyes with Tripitaka. “Maklu is under siege. What you want from them – they’re not going be able to give it. You should go back.”

“I will not,” Tripitaka said, frightened but determined, and Steve nodded.

They kept moving.

 

 

 

By nightfall, Tony had still not woken. They had found several more burnt-out farms, but no more bodies, and not a single living soul, either. On the fourth farm, they managed to find a small secondary well that seemed to have been overlooked by the invaders – at least the water wasn’t a poisonous green. By then, Steve’s head was spinning from hunger and thirst, and he’d been willing to chance it. So they drank their fill, rested, and drank some more, enough that Steve had to haul back both Tripitaka and himself before they could make themselves sick. And then they moved on.

“Can you see in the dark?” he asked Yulong as the sun set. The dragon-horse bobbed his head up and down.

“I cannot,” said Tripitaka.

Steve grimaced. Tony was still unconscious; Steve had just checked five minutes ago. He didn’t _want_ to put the two of them together, but Steve would need his hands free if he had to defend them – and on land, he was a more capable fighter than Yulong. “Alright. Then you’ll need to ride as well.”

It took a bit of situating, and slowed them further – Yulong could see, but he was apparently pickier about his footing when attempting to keep safe _two_ completely inept passengers – but they pressed on. Steve had slept last night; he was hungry, but that was nothing sleep would solve. Running was better, even if it was uneven running, forcing him to watch his feet like he never had to when he pounded the New York streets for exercise. That he had to look down so often, instead of being able to keep his eyes wholly on their surroundings, put him on edge. There were more ruins now, and still no people – the occasional low wall, bigger farms, bigger houses – and other buildings, broken, that he could no longer identify. It was dark enough that while he could see to run, he couldn’t see to identify everything around them; he forced himself not to look too hard at anything in particular and instead keep his eyes ready to catch movement. There was nothing.

One step further and he was in the middle of a war zone.

Their surroundings had changed in the blink of an eye. It was still night, but now there were lights – energy weapons firing high above, most of them focusing against on a titanic shield erected ahead – it seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon, curving gently away so that he couldn’t see how tall it was. Ships swarmed: small, fast, dart-like things with black wings, much stranger shapes that might actually be creatures, larger ovaloids that moved like giants through the swarms. He couldn’t tell who was supposed to be fighting who. The explosions were all around them, loud and distracting and sending Steve’s mind into overdrive.

Ground troops, he saw _ground troops_ , not firing but definitely armed as they swarmed over rubble, not taking notice of the four of them yet, but they would – “Get down!” he yelled at Tripitaka, turning back and throwing himself towards Yulong, who –

_\- wasn’t there -_

\- was there, and was rearing up in shock –

Steve grabbed his neck and dragged him backward, away, and they stepped out of the battle.

His own breathing was harsh in his ears. He pulled Yulong further back.

“What was that?” Tripitaka squeaked – he sounded terrified.

“Cloak,” Steve panted. Maybe. “Had to be.” Did it? Tony’s illusions didn’t block sound – ah, but the _demon’s_ had. What were the odds that Loki had some sort of similar technology? Or maybe it was the makluans – if the shield was theirs, then they probably had the technology.

If he’d doubted it before, it was clear now: Maklu was under siege. How were they supposed to get past that? On his own – he’d taken on worse odds, by far. But with Tripitaka? Not to mention Yulong – who looked pretty fierce as a dragon, but wasn’t exactly mobile in a fight on land. And Tony, who was already injured in some way that Steve couldn’t see.

“It’s an active battle-zone. Going around might take us to the wrong place – we need to wait it out, scout when it’s safer, and try then.” And hope the right side won – or that they could successfully keep out of site. “We’ll go a couple miles back, and hide off-road – whoever loses might be coming back this way.” They had ships, shields, illusions – how were they supposed to hide against people who might have scanners better than Tony’s?

“But – ”

“No buts, Tripitaka,” Steve said, as they began to trot along faster, Yulong apparently seeing the wisdom in Steve’s plan – what little there was of it.

“But you’re going the wrong way,” said a different voice entirely.

All of Steve’s nerves were strung tighter than a wire. Every breath he took – and that Tripitaka and Yulong and Tony took – he was aware of; every brush of the wind over their otherwise-silent surrounds, so different from the battlefield behind them. His vision was as clear at the periphery as it was at his centre of view, and he was keeping a sharp eye on their surroundings – yet he could not have said when the creature to their left had appeared, _if_ it had appeared. It might have been there all along.

It was the cat from the underworld – the White Tiger. It was sprawled on a tree-branch from a tree that Steve also could not be sure he had noticed, if it had been there at all; the cat somehow managed to give the impression that the tree was only there to be sprawled upon. As Steve and Yulong drew up short, the cat yawned widely at them, showing long incisors – longer than any normal cat, Steve would have sworn, but they didn’t show when it had lazily closed its mouth again, licking a tongue across and around its lower face.

“Who are you, really?” Steve demanded, stepping between it and Yulong – and Yulong’s passengers – with his shield at the ready.

“The Great Guardian of the West,” said Tripitaka reverentially, and Steve heard him scramble down from Yulong’s back, and the rustle of cloth as he bowed – no doubt deeply.

The cat nodded at Tripitaka. “What he said. And you’re going the wrong way.”

“We’ll be coming back, but that’s a battlefield,” Steve retorted. “And I thought you were supposed to be guarding the other side.”

The cat sighed and jumped to the ground; Steve twitched and restrained himself from throwing his shield at it. It didn’t go unnoticed by the cat. “I am on your side, politically as well as physically, Steve Rogers; in both cases, there is nowhere else I could be. The Western Gate is _gone_ – and if we do not want the same to happen to the Eastern Gate, then we need to get your friend to Kuan-Yin as soon as possible.”

“Me?” said Tripitaka, sounding stricken at the disapproval in the cat’s tone.

“Not you,” said the cat derisively. “You should go home. If you enter this city, nothing but death awaits you.”

“Oh,” said Tripitaka faintly.

“You want his help – or mine? Then take that headband off of him,” Steve said.  He could feel his chin jutting out – stupidly, childishly – but he didn’t have any patience left.

“I can’t. Only Kuan-Yin can do that,” the cat said, an eye-roll audible in its voice, and it turned its nose toward Yulong. “You should also go home,” and what came out of his throat next sounded like a tiger’s roar, but also like a name: one that suited Yulong far more than ‘Yulong’ did. “Your debt is discharged and you cannot be of service here; your lack of true form will kill you.”

Yulong whinnied, but very quietly. Steve didn’t look over his shoulder – but he then he heard a thump as Yulong went to his knees, and he couldn’t help but look. Yulong had turned his head back, and was gently nosing Tony’s still form off of his back – Steve strode forward, keeping the cat in his peripheral vision, and grabbed Tony before he could just fall into the dirt. Yulong rose immediately, and gave him an apologetic look as Steve pulled Tony into a fireman’s carry.

“I understand,” said Steve. His throat felt tight. “Go.”

Yulong turned to Tripitaka and nickered softly.

“I’m staying,” said Tripitaka.

“You’re a fool,” said the cat.

“Often, Honoured One,” Tripitaka admitted. “But Kuan-Yin called me, and I don’t think it was only to come _this_ far.” He patted Yulong gently on the nose, and Yulong bowed his head one more time – and then took off for the east at a gallop.

Damn. “I don’t have time to protect you,” Steve told Tripitaka. “You get hit, you die – you do _not_ take it out on Tony. This is on your own head.”

“I meant what I said before,” said Tripitaka, and then he looked down ruefully. “Although you had reason to be distracted, so I shall say it again. I _will not_ harm him knowingly. If I had known he did not have a soul – perhaps I would have chosen that evil even still, before I reached transcendence,” he admitted. “But never again.”

“He doesn’t have a soul?” The cat’s voice was flat, so much that it almost wasn’t a question. It stepped forward, in a way that made Steve step backward, very much on guard – “Relax. I am your _ally_. He does not have a soul...”

“No,” said Steve shortly.

“Not so far as I can tell,” added Tripitaka miserably.

“That is very strange,” remarked the cat. “And it is stranger still that he can be within these lands, and alive – he is alive, isn’t he?” it asked doubtfully.

“He is.”

“Well. Then our purpose remains the same. I shall escort you to the Eastern Gate – the guardian there knows me, and shall let us in. We must make all haste. Maklu is breaking apart, as you saw - you have arrived at a very late hour.”

Steve’s temper boiled over. He glared down at the cat – which looked back, smugly, because it was a Goddamned _cat_ , and he snarled, “You could have made the trip here a bit _easier_ , y’know.” Weeks, they’d been on the road – weeks, with people back home dying, and people here dying, and the cat was going to blame _them_ for being put through the alien-world merry-go-round? Like Hell.

“The shields could not be lowered,” said the cat. It sounded bored, and yawned again to prove it, providing another flash of those too-long teeth. “That would have been disastrous. Thanos is right on our doorstep, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Thanos?” That sounded... Greek. Right? Did Loki have an ally from the Greek pantheon?

“The Mad Titan.”

Steve blinked. “The Titan.” If Thanos was the Titan, then who –

“Yes,” said the cat, regarding him with a faint trace of curiosity, a larger portion of boredom, and a middling amount of impatience. “Who did you think the Titan was?”

 _Loki. Reindeer games. Norse –_ that one worked. “Norse god of chaos.”

“Ah, the Outsider? Of course you would be confused,” murmured the cat. It began to saunter off down the road – back toward the battlefield – with its tail waving in the air like a very fluffy banner. Steve glared after it – and grabbed Tony more securely, briefly passing his hand in front of Tony’s face. Still breathing – and still not awake. He started after the cat, Tripitaka trotting behind them both.

“What do you mean, ‘of course’?” Steve demanded.

“Your precautions – wise precautions,” the cat admitted, sounding like it was having teeth pulled to make it say that, “of not saying the Outsider’s name... powers of such levels can track it.” It turned its head to the side, allowing Steve to see all of its very white teeth when it grinned – much like the Cheshire Cat, Steve thought, and great, that was all they needed. “But Thanos is of such a level that he will know we discuss him no matter what pseudonym is used, so in his case misdirection is quite useless.”

Steve felt all his conclusions shift. “Thanos is the one that’s been attacking the pantheons?”

“No,” said the cat, again sounding impatient. “The pantheons are attacking _him_ ; Thanos is attacking the cluster. Of multiverses,” he elaborated, his drawl implying that he didn’t expect them to understand what he meant.  

Steve did. And it sounded an awful lot like ‘trying to destroy everything’.

“So it is true,” said Tripitaka. “The end times – death has come to break the cycle at last.”

“Perhaps,” said the cat.

“Then where does the Outsider fit in?” Tony’s self-appointed mission. Another cluster dead and unable to be reborn. This was entirely _separate?_

Did that make it nothing more than revenge? No – Loki existed to cause chaos. By the name ‘Outsider’, apparently the ‘powers’ in this place knew that Loki wasn’t from this cluster – so they probably had some inkling of how his original one had met its end. If he was their enemy –

“He doesn’t, except that he’s loud and distracting,” said the cat dryly. “Which, admittedly, has proved useful several times in the defence against Thanos, and no doubt shall again, although I personally wouldn’t trust him as far as you could swing a cat.”

Loki was _on their side?_

 _Tony, damn you, wake up,_ Steve thought grimly.

“This way, now,” the cat purred, and they stepped back into the war.

He hadn’t been expecting it that soon. The boundary had moved ten yards forward, dropping them back into the middle of the firefight before he’d been ready – and it _was_ a firefight now: the ground troops that had been moving forward earlier were now falling back, ducking for cover as bolts of light lanced out from the left to smash them into dust. Small clouds of it lingered wherever the energy bolts had met a target.

Fortunately, reflexes born of Erskine’s serum and honed in a different world’s war didn’t need Steve to be prepared: he raised his shield and stepped in front of Tripitaka just in time to deflect a blast that otherwise would have taken the monk’s head off – or disintegrated him. More beams blasted out of the dark, and Steve shoved Tripitaka toward the closest cover he could see – regrettably, already occupied, but that was preferable to the alternative. He hop-skipped backward, avoiding wild shots at his feet – not so wild when any one of them might kill him – and looking around desperately for the cat. Its white fur was nowhere to be seen.

He ducked behind cover, shield last, propping Tony up so he could be sure the armour was entirely out of the way – and ducked a claw to the face, grabbing Tripitaka and throwing him flat just in time to prevent the panicked monk from running away from their new attackers and right back into the line of fire. Tripitaka stayed down and Steve swung out low and vicious with the shield – Maklu’s defenders might be the ones firing on them right now, but _they_ didn’t know there were friendlies out here. _These_ were the same soldiers as had been attacking earlier. Steve deflected a strike with some sort of humming blade and backhanded the soldier across the face, catching its helmet with the edge of his shield; the helmet splintered beneath the blow, revealing familiar features: elongated jaw (almost beak-like, really) with a flattened nose, eyes set too wide apart, dark purple skin that was more like hide.

His mind faltered; his body did not. The chitauri soldier reeled back, screeching, and Steve kicked out, keeping himself low – ever mindful of the shots whistling by overhead, of the terrible flimsiness of their cover – and kicked it out into cover. A glancing shot caught it in the arm and turned it into another eerily still dust-cloud.

Chitauri. Loki – the Loki _he_ had fought – had been their ally, something of like their leader. Thor had said he thought his brother was a pawn. _Was_ Loki in league with Thanos, then?

 _Two versions of the same guy,_ Steve reminded himself. He needed to keep his eyes open and gather more intel before jumping to conclusions.

Tripitaka was panicking, trying to flee – Steve snagged him without effort and hauled him down, half-tripping him over Tony’s motionless form. He stuck a hand across Tripitaka’s mouth before the monk could scream – again. “Listen to me!” Steve demanded. “You follow orders, you don’t get killed. We’re going to get through this – but you have to follow my commands!”

The monk nodded, his head shaking so fast that Steve wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t just that – but Steve let him go and he didn’t start screaming again. “I’ll follow,” he said instead, voice weak and thread and barely audible over the continuing fire across ground and sky.

 _At least nobody’s decided to start firing down on us,_ Steve thought, and made thanks for large blessings.

More chitauri fled as all cover was slowly but methodically blown away by the city’s defenders. Steve could feel it through their own pile of rubble – nobody was focusing on them, but every so often a shot would go astray and eat through another foot of their cover. They were going to need to find a better spot. Where?

The objective was to move forward; cover that accomplished that objective was superior to cover that didn’t. He focused to the left, and hoped that a sixty-degree angle wouldn’t be too far off – if only that damn cat hadn’t run off.

Or gotten turned to dust by its own side.

_Firefight’s a bad time to be maudlin, Rogers. It’s a cat, it’ll be fine. Nine lives, right?_

He glanced down at Tony’s body. Form. Not body – not _just_ a body, not yet.

“See that?” Steve shifted his grip to grab Tripitaka’s shoulder and pointed out the cover. Fifteen feet – and better angles from there. “When I say go, you run.”

“I will never make that,” said Tripitaka, with the soul-deep belief of someone who had spent his entire life tripping over his own sandals.

“You ran across a damn tightrope, you can do it,” said Steve. “I’m gonna cover you – on my mark. Three Two. One. Run!”

Steve hurtled himself out from behind cover, body tucked into a roll, limbs curled up behind his shield – he _felt_ the impacts of these weapons, felt his shield shake beneath them in a way it never had for bullets or chitauri beams. Behind him Tripitaka was running – Steve intercepted two shots meant for him, unthinking; this was battle and he didn’t need to think for this. More fire, seemingly random; Steve leapt, deflected more from Tripitaka, and nearly did a one-handed cartwheel getting back to Tony.

Overhead, one of the big ovaloid ships dropped lower and began pumping out fire down upon the defenders’ location, green rain that shrieked as it fell. Steve didn’t waste time regretting their losses – he grabbed Tony and booked it, skidding into a position beside Tripitaka for a moment, and then shoving Tripitaka up and onward. Now he had to worry about fire from both sides: with reinforcements, the chitauri weren’t going to keep hiding for long. Sure enough, as Steve dragged Tripitaka low, behind a pile of rubble little more than two feet high, an armoured head took a quick glance out from a spot just a bit behind them.

When its head didn’t get blown off from that first look, it took a longer look, this time with its weapon – and Steve leapt on it, grabbing the spear-staff-whatever and throwing it forward as violently as he could while twisting his entire body over in midair. He hit the ground and rolled with it, the razor-edge of his shield slicing deeply into an alien limb, almost severing it; he absorbed a kick to the side (or rather, let the suit Tony had designed for him absorb it) and yanked _that_ foe’s foot out from under it, bringing his legs around in a swift move that landed with its head on the ground and his knee halfway through its skull. There was a third, but it was running – Steve ducked back out, swatted aside blue staff-fire, and caught Tony’s lifeless hand well enough to be able to drag him further forward. The armour could withstand hits from the chitauri weapons; he wasn’t sure if it was the same when it came to the makluans’, so he kept his shield focused on that and tried not to wince when Tony got hit twice by blasts from behind. The makluans _were_ still firing – but not very often anymore.

Something dropped, off to their left, something that Steve didn’t see but felt shake through his skin and bones. He stumbled, shoved Tripitaka forward, and they were out.

Out. Elsewhere. Night had turned to twilight; the faintest glimmer of a red sky could still be seen in the west. Even as Steve plastered himself to one of the now-standing walls, he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. The city-shield was gone, razed or defeated, but they weren’t surrounded by ruins anymore – these buildings still stood, not rubble that looked like stone, but some material that looked and felt more like glass. And aliens, _everywhere_ – blue-skinned and pointy-eared, or furry green, and ones with more limbs than Steve’s brain liked. None had wings, but some had hair that flowed like capes, and as they hurried along he couldn’t see how they didn’t trip up on it, or how no one else did either.

 _“Intruders!”_ someone cried, and then they were at the centre of attention, weapons turning toward them; by the reactions, alien as they were, he could immediately pinpoint which of them were trained military and which weren’t, and the differences in clothing styles – _uniforms_ – snapped into place. He was already standing over Tony; Steve shoved Tripitaka behind him. He’d never dropped his shield from its raised position.

“Don’t be idiots!” roared another voice – a woman’s, deep and full of authority. The alien woman who shoved her way forward wore that authority like a cloak as easily as she wore the deep grey plate armour that clad her head-to-toe. “They’re pilgrims – leave off!”

The military aliens lowered their weapons in smooth movements and hurried on with their business; the civilians, all looking rather more frightened, scattered. The armoured woman walked up uncomfortably close – as close as anyone had in Shenzhen – and stared down at him: Steve forced himself to stay on guard and _not lash out_. “Ma’am.”

“You need to go back to your empire,” she said harshly. Her voice seemed to come through a series of slits in her helmet on either side of where her mouth ought to be... but with a closer look, Steve wasn’t sure that those slits _weren’t_ her mouth. Mouths. “This realm is about to be under siege; I’m sorry, but your pilgrimage is over.”

Blood was thrumming in Steve’s ears. What was going on? More illusions? Some sort of teleportation as they stepped over an invisible border? “We have to find Kuan-Yin,” he said. It wasn’t teleportation. He could see it now, amber street-lights reflecting off of the buildings behind them – buildings they’d left behind, but he could pick out now how they would be after the battle: he could see the shape of the ruins among them.

“She can’t see you,” snapped the armoured woman. She had to be an officer of some sort. “Didn’t you hear me? Go _home_.”

“The battle already started,” Steve told her. “We were just in it.” They had run – up, there, beside that weirdly-shaped building – no wonder the rubble piles seemed so strange, so inhuman. These buildings were inhuman: as well they might be, built by aliens. “What’s _happening?_ ”

The slits where her eyes might be seemed to gleam, and she brought a hand up toward his shield. Steve braced himself, but she didn’t do more than touch it with a fingertip before dropping her hand back to her side. “The city is breaking,” she said, like a murmur, almost to herself.

“What does that mean?” asked Tripitaka anxiously, poking his head out from behind Steve.

“It means don’t repeat that,” snapped the officer, and in a quieter voice, “We don’t need a panic. Your friend – I see now.” She flicked her fingers against the shield, and it _shivered_ in Steve’s grip, like it never had at the touch of anyone else – he _knew_ how to make it do that, to make it hum at its own unique frequency, but how did _she?_ The feeling was almost one of betrayal, but then she pointed onward, and said, “There. That’ll give you authority to pass through. Proceed.”

“Ma’am?”

She stepped aside, and almost instantly seemed to fade into a crowd of other soldiers jogging toward where Steve knew the battle would be. They didn’t magically fade away as the crossed the invisible line, though – they kept going for the front, feet not quite in time. Steve crouched and hauled Tony up – _wake up, please wake up_ – and grabbed Tripitaka long enough to ensure that the monk was following. “Come on.”

It was the same place – the same place, but at different _times_ , and these people didn’t know what was coming.

No. That was wrong. They knew exactly what was coming; they just hadn’t met it yet.

“Come on,” he told Tripitaka again, grabbing Tony again and stepping forward. “And stay behind me.” The shield went first – the shield always went first. Into the unknown.

The streets were like the streets of Europe: twisty, thinning and widening without warning: they weren’t the neatly planned avenues of New York. Glass-fronted buildings ran right up against ones made of material that looked like brick, that looked like silk, that looked like some sort of overgrown plant; they jammed up against once another without mercy in a constant competition for space. The streets, however, were all made of the same material: the elegantly-sculpted white stone of the road.

They crossed through four intersections and had to wait at a fifth while a train of floating vehicles went through, carrying blank-faced, trembling civilians off to the north. After that, vehicle traffic increased. There was no sign of the flying ships that had been present before – or rather, later – but then, maybe those were all military; and in any case, they were now among sky-scrapers. Some of the objects being transported were obvious: guns, even advanced guns, were recognizable. The rest, Steve could only guess at the purpose of.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Tripitaka complained eventually. Apparently transcendence didn’t fix whining.

“Join the club,” Steve told him.

A shrill whistle pierced the air, and everyone in sight threw themselves away from the middle of the street to press up against the nearby buildings – Steve followed their lead, and a moment later _felt_ the rumbling footsteps of something enormous, just before a hairy grey _thing_ , which looked like a hippo crossed with a lion, came charging down the street and off toward the east. It wasn’t pursued by any sort of handler – hell, maybe it was its own handler. Maybe that was their general, and that was why everybody got out of the way, rather than just its size.

Steve didn’t know and didn’t care. He was waiting for the transition. Every footfall was a gamble, every step forward filled with anticipation: where would they end up next?

It wasn’t a war zone, he discovered, as the world changed utterly between two breaths. It was a darkness and a silence so absolute that if it hadn’t been for the breathtaking cold, he’d have thought he’d passed out. The cold _burned_ , searing his exposed skin, and he tripped and nearly fell over something in his path that he couldn’t see.

“Oh, no,” said Tripitaka. “No...”

Steve looked over his shoulder. A moment later, his eyes adjusted, and he could see Tripitaka – just faintly. There was still light coming from Tony’s arc reactor, even muffled as it was with him thrown over Steve’s shoulder. These weren’t the same ruins as before: the ground was uneven, but the piles of rubble had long since been flattened, losing their individual forms. Tripitaka was staring about in horror.

Tony made an indistinct noise, and the armour stirred.

“Thank You,” Steve offered up under his breath, hurriedly kneeling and setting Tony down into a sitting position, wincing as the light from the arc reactor burned away the best of his night vision again. “Tony?”

“What – ” Tony sounded groggy, but he quickly got over it – and began sounding as horrified as Tripitaka had looked. “No. No, no – ”

“Tony – ”

Tony’s eyes slid past Steve and settled on Tripitaka, and he lunged to his feet, ducking past Steve and grabbing Tripitaka by the collar - and lifting, and squeezing. “You! Why _you?_ _WHY?”_ he shouted, shaking Tripitaka like a leaf. The monk shoved at his arms feebly, mouth opening and closing without drawing in a breath.

“Tony, put him down!” Steve ordered, trying to pull Tony’s arm down, but he might as well have tried the move on Thor, or the Hulk. “Tony!” If Tony didn’t _stop_ squeezing Tripitaka, it wouldn’t matter that he hadn’t used enough force to break Tripitaka’s neck outright: he’d strangle Tripitaka to death instead.

Tony stilled, staring at Tripitaka wordlessly – the monk was still trying, completely hopelessly, to fight him off. Yet he didn’t use the headband against Tony, although he’d proven before that he didn’t need to speak aloud to make it work. He just – scrabbled, pathetically.  

The armour’s fingers opened stiffly, like they were directed by an automaton and not a person. Tripitaka dropped into a heap, wheezing and hacking and shaking all over – and he had to be in danger of frostbite or hypothermia, now. Steve’s face had already gone numb, and while the suit kept him warm enough for now, that wouldn’t last much longer. He cupped his hands over his lower face belatedly.

“Tony,” Steve tried again. His hands muffled the words, but not to the point where they were unintelligible. “Tony – I’m really glad you’re awake. But we need to move on and get out of here.”

“There’s nowhere to go,” Tony said quietly. His arms dropped back to his sides and he sagged: half the marionette’s strings cut, and it couldn’t quite hold itself up on its own.

Steve rubbed a hand briskly over his face, trying to generate some heat. Whatever was going on in Tony’s head, Steve needed him, if not moving, then at least not _actively_ opposing forward movement while they were stuck in _this_ particular spot. It was as lethal as the active battlefield had been, if in a different way. But they were only just inside the border going the other way, so – he set his feet and _shoved_ at Tony, following after and snagging Tripitaka on his way by. The monk wasn’t up to standing on his own.

But the darkness didn’t change, didn’t give way to the light and the noise of the streets before. And Tony just let himself be shoved over, not catching his balance as he so easily could have done, instead falling on his ass and sending chips of concrete-glass-material scattering as he slid to a stop. He sat there, staring up at Steve as Steve kept going, and found nothing more than the dark.

“I told you,” Tony said, his voice dull and lifeless.

Steve pulled out the faceplate his pocket and chucked it at Tony; it hit him right over the arc reactor and bounced off to land at his feet. “Since when do _you_ give up without even trying? I don’t know where you think this is, but you were only unconscious a couple of hours, and this place isn’t _forever_. We walked in, we needta find the other side and walk out. Get _up._ ”

Tony stared at the faceplate, and then at Steve. “You’re warm,” he said, sounding surprised, and wonder of wonders, climbed to his feet. “You’re as warm as he is.”  

“I think my face has frostbite.” Steve rubbed at it again, then stopped as a memory floated to mind, something about not damaging frozen skin and cells. He glanced down at Tripitaka – who wasn’t making much of an effort to stand on his own. Tripitaka was wearing far less insulation than Steve, and he was half his mass, to boot – he should have been going hypothermic by now, yet he was instead looking between the two of them with an expression that seemed to flicker between hope and despair.

“You’re... not dead. Yet,” and on the ‘yet’, Tony looked down and to the side.  

“I don’t plan to be,” said Steve. He set Tripitaka back onto his own feet – the monk stood up without a wobble – and put his hands on Tony’s shoulders. As soon as his gloves came into contact with the armour, it was like all of the heat leached out of them right into the metal; it took an effort not to recoil. “Tony, this city, it’s messed up. Some places are at different times than others. We need to get to another place where the time is different – because right _now_ it is lethally cold. Please, _listen_ to me – I need you to fly us someplace else.”

Heat began seeping from the armour into his hands, a burning sensation that made his fingers spasm before he got a hold of himself. “Anywhere you ask,” Tony murmured. The broken faceplate at his feet turned into a gleaming puddle and fused with his nearest foot, quickly being absorbed by the rest of the armour, which now formed a new faceplate. _“Hang on.”_

Steve barely had time to grab for Tripitaka before his other hand locked in place. A plated arm slid around his side and mag-locked as well, and then they took off – speed low, or so Steve thought. It was hard to tell with his jawbone beginning to go numb. His internal sense of movement seemed out of balance; it was hard to tell when they sped up or slowed down. Perhaps it was the total lack of external cues – as soon as the ground fell away, there was nothing but Tripitaka – bug-eyed, with his hands clasped over his mouth – and Tony, a silent statue against the sky. He _could_ tell that they were moving parallel to the ground, not just up, and then –

Light flooded his eyes, blinding him; a few seconds of frantic blinking brought it back to normal, made him realize that the sun-bright day he’d thought they’d flown into was actually cloudy and overcast. They were sharing airspace with the occasional other thin, purple dart zipping through the sky, and far off in the distance – over a city that seemed to sprawl on _forever_ , as though the towers of downtown Manhattan had spread across all of New York State – he could see a pair of dragons flying in concert.

Tony made a choked noise through the armour’s speakers, and they dropped a couple dozen feet; Steve’s heart leapt up into his throat before Tony regained control and brought them in for a fast landing. Steve barely stayed on his feet – but _Tripitaka_ didn’t seem to have any such problems; the monk twisted free of Steve’s grip and raised his hands to the sky, his face open with wonder.

Tony, though, staggered like he was drunk.

Around them, aliens like they’d seen before parted as though crazy people falling out of the sky was a matter of no consequence – possibly they all had better things to do. There were none of the same type of military personnel that Steve had seen before, but now _everyone_ wore some sort of non-dyed robe, and carried a weapon such as a sword or a spear.

Slow, still half in-control, Tony fell to one knee, one palm against the pavement. Steve steadied him before he could fall any further, kneeling with him – “Hey, look at me,” he tried. “Lower the faceplate – ” the damned thing kept him from being able to tell if Tony was _breathing_ , let alone what he was thinking. Armour had its uses, but that didn’t mean it should be worn _all the damn time_.

The helmet vanished slowly, crawling back in a way that was creepily organic, like some living thing. Which it might as well have been – a living shell that Tony cocooned himself within. One of the fastest minds on earth, and he was hiding away like a snail – all of this was wrong. Behind the faceplate Tony looked dazed. A thin sheen of sweat coated his skin. When he met Steve’s eyes, his own were electric blue.

“Tony,” Steve said carefully, “your eyes are glowing.”

“Network,” Tony breathed. “S’internet. Alien. Big.” His gaze began to drift again – Steve waved a hand in front of his face, and Tony only half-tracked the motion.

“Their minds inhabit not just their bodies, but the whole of the city,” said Tripitaka, and he bowed to no one in particular with profound respect. “I hear it now. It is open. They are at war, but not yet under siege.”

“What?” Steve glanced between them. Tony – that, he got. But _Tripitaka?_

“The river,” said Tony. He blinked, and began to look a bit more aware, but the blue haze hadn’t faded from his eyes – and it was swimming just beneath his skin, too, barely perceptible but definitely there. Had he designed extremis to do that? “Nanites. All the rivers.”

“He has nanites in him?” Steve asked, and looked from Tony to Tripitaka and back again. Tripitaka’s eyes weren’t glowing – but he’d been _dead_. Steve had pulled his body out – “He _is_ nanites.” He looked around him. These people – were their entire bodies made of nanites?

“We are more than the sum of our parts,” said Tripitaka serenely.

He was a _copy_. Were they all copies? “You killed your original – ”

“No,” Tripitaka held up a hand. “The soul – the consciousness – is _transferred_ , not replicated.” He looked sadly at Tony. “The nanites may assist... but we are beyond matter.”

“Borjigin corrupted extremis,” Tony said. The armour pulled away from one hand and he rubbed at his face – Steve took the human gesture as a good sign, even if Tony was still crouched and not standing. “Used alien tech – bastardized alien tech. This is pure form.” He grinned, and his teeth were ridiculously white. “Mine’s extremis, s’poor copy. Got overloaded there.”

“You’re back now?” Steve asked, because Tony might now be using full sentences – more or less – but the grin was not actually reassuring.

“Sure,” said Tony, standing – Steve stood with him. “Got the lowdown off the news networks, too. Realm in serious jeopardy, different sections splintering off into different times, Kuan-Yin has a world-wide APB out on us.”

Steve looked around. The city might be under attack, but right now – whenever that was – although there were plenty of aliens hurrying around with weapons, it seemed a more workmanlike hurry than an active crisis-inspired rush. “Tony – it wasn’t the guy we thought it was. It’s somebody else called Thanos.”

“Yeah, got that too,” said Tony. It was just a shade too flippant. “And I think you’re all crazy if you think _he’s_ on your side. You wanna know what happened back there?” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder with his bare hand. “That was the end of the universe. I’d know, ‘cause I’ve seen it before. Guess who caused it?”

 _That wasn’t all that happened back there,_ Steve thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. “He’s still not the immediate threat right now. The city’s breaking apart and they think it’s something you did.”

“Uh-huh, APB,” Tony agreed.

Steve glanced around at the aliens giving them a conspicuous amount of space. “They’re not trying to arrest us.”

“Not that sort of APB. Point is, _fuck_ her,” Tony said, suddenly turning vicious. “She wants something, she can come explain what the hell’s going on.”

“You can’t talk that way about the Bodhisattva,” said Tripitaka, sounding horrified.

Tony rounded on him, cold and impassive – and facing him directly, unflinching. “I heard you, back there,” he said, sounding too calm – too calm, but it wasn’t because he was afraid. This was anger, the sort of rage that made Steve narrow his eyes, because it was controlled and directed and Steve didn’t know where _at_. “Not much else to hear there. I know exactly what you would and wouldn’t have done if _you’d_ known.”

“Why should she have known? You are impossible,” Tripitaka argued back. “And she is the Goddess of Mercy.”  

Steve felt like he was missing half the conversation – he could almost tell what was going on from what he _did_ hear, but it was as if they shared something now that he lacked, making him slow to keep up. A petty resentment, but it was easy to entertain. Too easy.

“Then you go find her!” Tony threw out a hand to indicate himself and Steve as well, and just like that the resentment vanished. “ _We_ came here for Earth, and there is a library nexus two miles – ” he pointed, “ – that way. I can get everything I need from there.”

Tripitaka looked very grim. “I will find her and bring her there,” he promised – and vanished.

Steve started. “ _What_ the – when did he – ”

“Probably just now, when he hooked into the realmnet,” Tony answered. An ugly sort of jealously flickered over his face. “We get to go the slow way.” Metal crawled over his exposed skin, and he offered an armoured hand to Steve.

“Two miles?” Steve looked at the relative peace around them. “This won’t last.” He grabbed on.

 _“I know,”_ said Tony, and they were sky-bound.

 

 

Access requested: 2394.9201

_no_

Access requested: 2332.1039

_no_

Access reque

_no_

Even with his quickly-written auto-deny script, the network access requests were distracting, annoying, tying up ports and memory. But the thought of just turning everything _off_ , the way he had when he’d gone after the koi-fish – no. Not with the memory of an altogether more absolute silence so close, a void not just of deliberately requested signals but of _everything_ , the stars themselves silent –

_ stop  _

He was here and Steve was alive. Against all odds and hostile aliens, they’d made it to Maklu, and the key to fixing extremis was so close he could almost taste it.

Warnings lit up across his sensor processing suites and targeting went from a background process to priority: missiles inbound. The sky had changed its frequencies, slewing over to the red end of the spectrum, a bloody dawn – and it was no longer mostly-empty. Tony dropped, pulling and half-rewriting on the fly evasive and countermeasure subroutines crippled by having Steve hanging on – belatedly, he activated the ICG, but it was too late and he shut it off a moment later rather than drain power further.

They – and the entire city – were beneath some sort of shield, a massive construction with energy readings so high that they saturated half the sensors unfortunate enough to be pointed at it. But it wasn’t complete: there were cracks in it, jagged energy disturbances that spoke of weakness – and in two places it had failed entirely. One, a tiny hole no larger than the one over Manhattan had been, was blockaded by a swarm of dragons – but the other, some thirty kilometers off, was a rent in the sky probably larger than Manhattan itself, and from it chaos poured forth.

Thirty klicks and they’d be somewhen else, but some of the enemy had already advanced across that distance and skirmishes were being fought everywhere – like the one they’d flown into, a match-up between people dressed like Huns and Celts, and Tony didn’t think either side was actively targeting them so much as they were both shooting at anything that wasn’t firmly friendly. Flares deployed – more nanites lost – and they were nearly to the far edge of the fight, which was a damn good thing, because Tony wasn’t quite sure how Steve hadn't blacked out or thrown up from the Gs they were pulling.

 _“Hang on, almost there,”_ Tony reassured him, getting a muffled grunt in reply – and then they were clear, because the sky changed again – shifting bluer – and half-emptied.

Unfortunately, Tony was pretty sure it was the wrong half.

The city-shield – well, realm-shield, to be more accurate – was gone. Black, not-quite-spherical ships hung in the sky, each one large enough to dwarf Stark Tower, and below them the city was burning. Smoke curled into the sky, and the occasional bright gout of flame, carrying with it the sounds of street-to-street fighting – but this was the last resistance, because the sky was clearly, firmly the dominion of the enemy. If Tony hadn’t realized that immediately, then the point was driven home a moment later, when their flight path took him into the middle of an invisible trip-wire – or maybe it was something aimed at him, he couldn’t tell – and he had time to briefly, viciously think _oh fuck _ before extremis shut down.

It was worse than going blind – he _was_ blind, there was no HUD in this version of the suit. He was deaf, as well, trapped in his own head – all his sensors were down. Particle analysis – from sub-microscopic to sub-atomic – pressure sensors, temperature sensors, cloaking, spectrums that ordinary humans couldn’t see – it was gone. It was gone and it was even worse than being in that shell of Maklu, the end of the world, and he wasn’t even sure how he was still _conscious_ – extremis was wired into him and he wanted it _back_ , _please, stopstopstopstopstop_ and it wasn’t _working_ –

Gyroscopic sensors of an altogether more rudimentary sort pinged at his brain; he was tumbling. He was falling, which meant _Steve_ was falling. Without extremis active, Tony might not survive hitting the ground. Steve, without a suit, definitely wouldn’t. Steve, who was – still holding on, _please let him still be holding on_ – Tony flailed with his limbs and he could feel _something_ in the way; he latched on with what was probably painful pressure, but better that than the alternative of dropping him. They were dropping fast enough anyway.

He was falling and he couldn’t tell which way was up; he was too dizzy and anyway they were in _freefall_ , a state which emulated zero-G. But he could tell which way met wind-resistance if he stuck out a limb, and just like that the horizon that he couldn’t see levelled out in his brain and he flipped himself over, twisting like a cat (or a man twenty years younger than he should be) – movement achieved and momentum conserved even without the repulsors to shunt it elsewhere –

 _Pressure,_ so much as to be painful – they’d hit _something_ hard – but they were still falling, albeit with their speed much greatly reduced; luck was on their side and –

They hit the ground and Tony blacked out.

 

 

One moment they were flying through the air in a series of evasive manoeuvres that put every other bit of flying Steve had ever seen to shame, the next they were falling out of the sky at the same speed that they’d been fleeing from the fight. The repulsors had cut, and for the first instant Steve thought that Tony was just dropping them again as he had before, away from the massive enemy ships overhead – but the mag-lock had failed, too, and the wind-shear nearly tore them apart before Steve could grab hold of him, and find himself grabbed in turn – and then flipped as Tony forced them around through aerial acrobatics so that the armour took the force of the crash as they slammed through a thick glass pane. Steve brought his hands up to shield his face – the most he could do, really – and they continued to fall for another half-second before they hit the floor. Tony took the brunt of it, but Steve still felt all the wind get knocked out of him. He rolled off of Tony and waited for his muscles to stop spasming long enough for him to draw breath – too long. Tony wasn’t moving at all.

“Tony,” Steve said – well, mouthed; he didn’t have the air to speak as he tried to shake Tony’s shoulder. “Tony,” he tried again on a gasping inhale – “Tony, damn it, not again, wake _up_ , you’re fine, you’ve gotta be fine – ”

“Nrk,” said Tony, and the armour turned to putty beneath Steve’s fingers. It didn’t fall off of Tony in pieces the way it had that one horrible, awful time, but it was definitely no longer entirely solid. Thankfully, it at least in part cleared away from Tony’s face – Steve immediately leaned over, checking if Tony was able to focus.

“You gotta stop doing this to me,” Steve half-complained at him – Tony’s eyes flicked up to Steve’s face and seemed clear, thank God.

“Oof,” muttered Tony, struggling to sit up. The armour sludged off of him, although it wasn’t a mess – the blobs of it that landed on the floor bounced up like enormous water droplets on waxed paper, keeping to themselves. “Ow.”

“You okay?” Other worries belatedly asserted themselves. If extremis wasn’t working, then Tony lacked its healing factor; and without that, it probably wasn’t such a great idea to let him be moving after the hit he’d just taken. “The armour – ”

“Hard reset,” Tony said tiredly, and he scrubbed at his eyes and ears. “It’ll reboot in a sec. Jesus, I dunno how you live like this.”

“Like what?” Steve sat back on his heels and let a larger portion of his attention turn to their surroundings – enough to actually take them in instead of just assess immediate threats.

He didn’t think there _were_ any immediate threats. The battle might still be going on outside, but inside, it was both peaceful and deserted. They’d landed in an open atrium of some sort, lit mostly by the sky outside beyond a soaring ceiling made almost entirely of glass –now with a large hole in it where they’d crashed through. A few shards of glass littered the floor around them; otherwise, aside from themselves, there was really nothing here. The air was clean and still – perhaps slightly stale – and he couldn’t hear anything other than their own voices echoing back. There were at least three exits, aside from the hole in the roof: an enormous set of sliding silk doors, and two smaller ones, done up in discreet black.

“With regular human senses,” Tony said wryly.

“I don’t,” Steve pointed out. “Though it’s not that bad, from what I remember.”

“Yeah, that’s what _I_ thought,” Tony muttered. “Okay, reboot in three, two, on-holy _fuckingshit,”_ he gasped, his eyes opening and flaring blue. The liquid-armour _shimmered_ , and then ran up around him to clothe him again, but it didn’t cover his head.

“Tony!” Steve leaned in again.

“I’m good! My god, this place is amazing – it’s _built_ for this, and it’s genius, holy crap – this is multi-core processing fully realized, Steve, Steve, you have no idea – ” he was grinning, wild-eyed with delight, and clutching at Steve’s arm with one hand – Steve wasn’t sure if it was because of enthusiasm or a need for support to keep himself from falling over. “It’s here, it’s _all here_ – ”

“This is the library,” Steve realized. Even in free-fall, Tony had managed to aim them for it, somehow.

“ _Oh_ yeah. Not really a library – it’s an interface point,” Tony said, leaning more and more of his weight against Steve; Steve shifted to steady him better, ready to catch him if he fell. “The net, here, the information – it’s big. Way more data than I’ve got processing power to look at, especially since extremis is decades behind anything they’ve got... this place has spare datanodes, lets me run in parallel, enough to look through the stacks.”

“Like a card catalogue,” said Steve when Tony paused – more to fill the silence than anything else. He needed to keep Tony grounded.

“No, more like – getting fifty million minions and telling them to go see what the card catalogue contains,” Tony said, and laughed. It came out more like a giggle – Steve was almost entirely holding him up now. “Even the index is beyond Earth comparisons. And – ohhh,” he said, and slumped entirely forward. Steve caught him.

“Tony?” He carefully lowered Tony to the floor, then snapped his fingers in front of Tony’s face. “Tony?”

“I got it,” Tony said, the words slurring together. “Steve, sorry – I needta devote more onboard processing power to this if I want it to still make sense after I disconnect. But I got it. I can fix extremis.” His grip on Steve’s arm tightened briefly and then slackened, his hand falling away as he went limp.

“Damn it, Tony!” Steve swore at him.


	10. The Broken Window

Tony closed his eyes on Steve, and opened them again to see Maria Stark.

“Hello, Tony,” the thing that was not his mother said. His mother had never called him Tony – she’d called him Anthony when she was angry and _mio caro_ when she was not. But it looked like his mother – had his mother’s voice, right down to the very minute burr, the flaw that’d killed her singing career before it could start – not that her family would have let her be a professional singer anyways; the Carbonells were old money. The scent of the expensive perfume she’d always worn lingered in the air.

Somewhere, elsewhere, the rest of Tony’s mind was rewriting code from the base up, writing anti-viral and encryption protections that could withstand anything human or alien, because the last couple of days had proven that extremis was, even discounting the zombie-making part, full of security holes. So: patches for him, a worm for the rest of Earth – system-breaches that would make the hive-mind thing the zombies had going on about as formidable as a medieval castle trying to fend off modern artillery.

But that was all distant, remote. He was aware it was happening, but he had no control over it, or even a good view of it. He had been cut off from extremis again, and all those soon-to-be-implemented security fixes were as distant as Earth itself right now. Though this time he supposed he’d deserved it; he’d thrown his mind wide open to link to the library nexus.

At least Frigga had had the decency not to take Maria’s shape.

“People see me as they expect to see me,” it said. She said. _Aha,_ it was a she.

“Really? Because I’d kind of been picturing you like an even bitchier Christine Everhart,” he told her.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Tony,” she said gently. “You have more respect for Christine than that.”

Tony froze. It was a moment before he could even think to talk – a moment –

 _No extremis here,_ he realized all over again. No, he was in his own head. No extremis – but he wasn’t feeling blind like he had before. He felt – human, and he felt like feeling human was _normal_ , the status quo. That was – strange.

“I don’t like what you’re trying to imply,” he said flatly. “Kuan-Yin, right? Goddess of Mercy?” He added just a touch of a sneer to the last word – nothing over the top. Never let these types think they were worth going over the top _for_.

“That I am,” said Kuan-Yin, nodding his mother’s head regally.

“So.” Which question to ask first? “Why like this?” He was hooked into the city net – if she really wanted to talk to him that badly, she didn’t need to have waited until he’d gotten here.

“I wanted your consciousness to be as intact as possible when I spoke to you,” she explained, settling down on an overstuffed armchair that had... it might have been there before, actually; Tony wasn’t sure. This place had the feeling of a dream: the unimportant details didn’t get filled in.

“Well, that backfired.” Tony indicated the space behind him with a tilt of his head. “We’re missing my better half.”

“Programming can be duplicated,” Kuan-Yin explained. “Personality, memories... but _consciousness_ – the unique identifier – cannot, no more so than a soul can.”

Tony gave her a very thin smile and spread his hands out at his sides. “Bullshit.”

She tapped her cigarette over an ashtray sitting on a small side-table, and gave a long, smoky exhale. “You think you’re a copy? You aren’t. It’s very curious, how this consciousness – _your_ consciousness – managed to wind up separated from its soul – but you _are_ the original, that much is clear.”

He wasn’t a clone. He _wasn’t_ a clone?

Tony snorted and stuck his hands in his pockets – because he had pockets, no armour here. Pockets worked just as well, if he had to put on an attitude and couldn’t risk any sign of shaking hands. “So you know about that. I wasn’t sure – don’t you find it surprising?” he taunted her. “ _Curious_ , that some guy without a soul is wandering around a city designed to be _lethal_ to him?”

He wasn’t a clone. That made no sense – it was the obvious explanation for... everything, the when/where/whys that didn’t otherwise add up. No, he had to be a clone – but if he _wasn’t..._ shit. This was fucked up. Funny, how he’d gotten so used to the idea that thought it might be _wrong_ could be disconcerting.

“Not lethal. We have no desire to punish automatons – merely to keep them out of the city, for the safety of everyone. As for how you circumvented our defences, I don’t have to wonder,” Kuan-Yin said serenely. She took another drag from her cigarette. “I know you’ve seen the end of the multi-verse, Tony – the complete failure of all our defences is the only thing that would have let you wake up. This is, in fact, what I need to discuss with you.”

Tony mirrored her, and found himself holding a cigarette in one hand that suddenly wasn’t in a pocket. He hadn’t smoked in years – nicotine had never been his vice of choice. “So what, come to fix that mistake?”

“I _brought_ you here, Tony,” she replied. He was beginning to get sick of her infinite patience. “It wasn’t easy, trying to guide you here from afar without compromising the shield.” She smiled wryly. “I had to enlist the White Tiger’s aid. Do you know how rare it is for a cat to be helpful? I owe him many favours, now... but even a gate guardian can’t simply stroll forth into the mortal world, these days. It all had to go via proxies – the monk, the sorcerer, that damnably disobedient koi fish...” 

“Yeah, I’ve got some objections to your idea of _helpful_.”

“Obviously, I did not realize you did not have a soul when I provided Tripitaka with the collar.”

“And that makes it _better?”_

She regarded him curiously. “Have you ever learned without the application of pain?” Tony opened his mouth, prepared to lie, but – she was _in his head_ \- “Adult souls, set in their ways, never do.”

He couldn’t even argue with her. People were idiots; himself included. The best he could do was grumble, “Don’t let Steve hear you say that.”

“You give him too little credit. I _am_ sorry, Tony; I’d remove the collar, but it would take my physical presence and that’s not something that can be spared at this time. We digress. I need you to come here,” she said, and just like that, there they were: no longer sitting in nothingness, but standing before a squat, rounded building that looked out of place compared to the silk-and-glass spires of its surroundings. It was made of some sort of dark stone, as black as the road was white, and had no entrance as far as Tony could tell – and somehow, he knew this was true on its other side as well. It was all still just a dream, after all.

“Maklu is the centre of all worlds and from us all worlds spring forth,” said Kuan-Yin. “You have been to this place before. I know not what you did then, but whatever it was, it threatens the entirety of the multiverse.”

“I’ve never been here.”

“Not yet.”

Tony frowned. If they were out of sync in timelines, then he could see what she meant. But changing something that had already happened – there wasn’t enough energy for that; it would be the destruction of a universe in the creation of a new one. Ordinary time-travel just split off another branch reality; you didn’t travel back in time to your own, but to a parallel world. On the other hand, this was _Maklu_ , the centre of everything, the prime reality – aspects of _each_ of those two new parallel worlds would be incorporated here. So it... might actually be possible.

“I need you to do exactly what you did before,” Kuan-Yin said. “Change nothing. If you change a thing – everyone dies.”

“Now we’re back to impossible,” Tony complained. “Change _nothing_? You want me to set up a stable time loop.”

Backwards time travel was one thing, time _loops_ another – he missed extremis, fiercely; trying to work out the math in his purely biological brain was _so slow_.

“There is already an unstable time loop in place. It shall continue to iterate until it stabilizes or something breaks. If _it_ breaks, it has the potential to take with it every atom of this cluster.”

He didn’t need to run the numbers on how many lives that was – he already had, long ago. But no matter how staggeringly large the potential death toll – “Still doesn’t make sense. You want me to believe this is possible – I’m having difficulty, here. A stable time loop? Fine, the energy would be horrific, but at least smaller than the cluster’s sum total. An _unstable_ loop? One recreating – let me get this right – ” he peered at her over the tops of sunglasses that he might not have been wearing a moment ago – “the entirety of this cluster – ” she nodded at him, “ – whenever it iterates. No, the math doesn’t work. That’s like trying to build a fleet from the spare parts of one jet-engine. You might as well try to push a car from the inside, it won’t go – there’s no way that the energy requirements – ”

“This contains a doorway,” Kuan-Yin said, waving her cigarette at the building. “We call it the Font of Time. It looks out upon the underpinnings of reality – beneath which lays unreality.”

Tony swallowed.

That sort of instability – the instability required to do what Kuan-Yin was suggesting, producing energy out of nothing – was just – _existing_? The quantum uncertainty of whether or not their multiverse would continue – a constant roll of the dice. “How has this not destroyed the universe yet?”

“We’re not sure,” said Kuan-Yin. “The Font is a curious construction – it’s not just a window or a doorway, but a control device. If entered, a certain amount of direction is possible. Presumably this is how you created the loop that we are trapped in.”

“How many iterations?”

She lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “Impossible to know. They do not exist.” She paused. “We know that the loop is unstable, but not much else. It _should_ stabilize when you perform the exact same actions in the past as your future self-has already done. The multiverse will cease recreating and resume its normal course, with this part of history merely marking a knot in the weave.”

“Or I could make things better,” Tony murmured.

“Presumably, this is what you have been trying to do each time you come here – trying, and failing, since here we are yet again and you are still not satisfied.”

“If I’ve got more chances to get it right – ”

“But you don’t,” said Kuan-Yin. “Everything you touch during any loop is pulled in. You travelled back from another multiverse inside this loop – if it flies apart, everything in _this_ multiverse goes, because your loop stretches around it. Every time it iterates differently, thisis what you risk. And you _do_ risk it – the Font can only endure so much. We don’t know what the breaking point is, but we do know it exists.”

“Uh-huh,” Tony said, but he didn’t listen. Couldn’t. Right now the bulk of his processing power was elsewhere, and like hell he was letting this chance pass by without at least running the numbers – and then probably saying _fuck them_ and trying anyway, because if he could just _try_ – “How do I do this?”

“Stand within the Font, and look out upon the Gap; the Font will give you control of what you wish to see. It requires willpower.”

“The Gap,” Tony murmured. “The Void.”

“Yes.” Her voice was smoky as she added, “For obvious reasons, no soul in this city could do so.”

Not with the sights that lurked within – Tony remembered his reaction to those, even if he didn’t remember the sight itself. But it had pierced through rock, stone, metal, armour – the back of his head – and JARVIS... hadn’t seen it. Concentrating on _anything_ would be impossible; just the memory of the sight had been enough to drive him insane.

“That’s why you keep ‘automatons’ out,” Tony realized.

“Yes. You are extraordinarily unusual, Tony – to have had a soul and lost it; until now I’d have thought it impossible. The river must have been very confused to let you pass at all; your friend should not have been able to drag you out on this side.”

He glared at her accusingly. “And all the others? Every reality I’ve looked into, ‘constructs’ are dying. Tell me that’s coincidence.”

She shook her head. “It may be coincidence. It isn’t us. You _do_ have other enemies, Tony.”

Yeah, that was an understatement. Or perhaps a misdirection. He blew out an angry breath and dropped his cigarette on the ground, snubbing it out with his shoe. “You thought I had a soul.” And she thought he could somehow face the things in the Gap? Never-mind that it was a fate worth than death, that was _stupid_.

“Which caused me many doubts.” She puffed out a breath of smoke. “They were overcome by the knowledge that you had somehow already controlled the Font for a long enough period of time to cause this problem.”

“Okay. Fine.” He couldn’t tell how the rest of him was doing with the extremis problem. Hopefully well-enough along – or maybe this would be one of those cases where he woke up and it hadn’t been two seconds. If that was the case... then he was going to have to wait a bit longer at the library nexus, because he needed to finish with extremis first, and send Steve back with the cure. “You want us here, wait for me to disconnect and then poof us here in person.”

“I can’t.”

Tony glared at her. “I refuse to believe you people don’t have portals.”

“We have a realm falling apart and a city under invasion,” she said, and met his eyes with a gaze far more direct than any his mother had ever used. “If Thanos is given a chance to enter through to the places and times he has not yet conquered, then all your efforts will be for naught. Mark me well, Tony – this is very important. But although it’s not smaller, it _is_ far easier than our war against the Mad Titan. The multiverse is imperilled on all sides. I know you wish to return your friend home, and I know you wish to change things so fewer might have died.”

She reached up and placed a hand against his cheek. He couldn’t fathom why he let her, except that when she smiled, her teeth were far too pointy and sharp, there were far too many of them there to fit in her face, and he couldn’t see Maria in her at all.

“Do the right thing, Tony.”

He woke up, his mind crashing back together and diminishing.

Download complete.

_ run xtrms2-0inst.exe _

Warning: Operation may affect root.

_ override  _

Installing. Installation will be complete in: 7h 4m 11s

“I’m good to go,” Tony said, and opened his eyes. His vision wavered as part of the patch hit a sensor processing centre – he ignored it. Good to go. The coding for the zombie-cure was hidden in the back-end of it – a much simpler bit of programming than what he was applying to himself, which was nothing short of a full system upgrade. He’d been out for – two minutes. With the library’s processing power, it had been as good as ten years.

“About time,” said a voice _really_ close to his ear. Not Steve’s. Tony jerked away, the armour moving about him and pulling him into the air – defend and absorb, and _oh_ , he had ideas, now, ideas from data culled and compressed for just these purposes – written into the software, but the hardware implementation was going to be more involved for than was allowed in seven hours, four minutes, five seconds. Things like upgrades to the ICG, the subspace generators, his repulsors, his internal security – those things he could do on the fly. Faster synapses, force-fields, portable portal machines – those would take more time.

Part of him was looking forward to it. The rest of him had weaponry trained on the... cat... sitting next to his head.

“Tony,” Steve said, and his voice was filled with relief. “Please stop passing out. I’m starting to worry I’m boring.”

It was a pathetic attempt at humour, but Tony took pity on him. _“You? Never. What’s that?”_ he indicated the cat, letting some of his weaponry cycle down since Steve seemed both aware of and unthreatened by it.

“The White Tiger,” said Steve. “Guardian of the West.” Oh. So that was what she’d meant.

_“It’s a housecat.”_

“All housecats are tigers at heart,” drawled the cat. “Ready to rip off your face should you fail to please them. _You_ are displeasingly late.”

 _“So sue us,”_ Tony replied. _“It’s_ your _damn road.”_

Steve, for some reason, seemed to find that funny – Tony caught him concealing a smirk. But then he turned serious. “Did you get extremis figured out?”

 _“Yup. And a better portal machine.”_ One for which he currently didn’t have the materials. _“Which we’re using as soon as I’m done with this favour, and don’t think you don’t owe me for it. Twice over,”_ he warned the cat. It yawned at him.

“Favour?” Steve frowned. “If you’ve got it – we should get back to Earth as soon as possible. Especially if they think you’re in danger of destroying something here.”

 _“Bit late for that,”_ Tony admitted. He touched back down on the ground and offered Steve his hand again. _“Come on, I’ll explain on the way.”_

“You’ll get shot down again if you attempt to fly out of here,” the cat pointed out. “I shall show you a faster way.”

Tony looked to Steve, who raised an eyebrow. Damn. _“Fine.”_

The cat sat there, looking at them for a few seconds, and then, apparently bored, began grooming itself.

This somehow translated for Steve, because he picked the cat up – Tony half-expected it to claw him across the face, but instead it looked quite contented as Steve held it carefully in the curl of his arms. “You’re learning,” it said smugly. “Very good. The black door on the left.”

 _“You could just give me the directions,”_ Tony pointed out. There was no way the cat – the _talking_ cat – didn’t have access to the net. They headed for the door anyway, Steve still cradling the damn thing, and it slid back smoothly with a bit of applied pressure, revealing stairs going downward. His first instinct was to recoil, but no, it wasn’t a sewer below – it was their power system. Built with plenty of space in mind.

“This grid runs beneath the entire city,” the cat explained. “And you’re more of a fool than most if you think putting sensitive information onto the net is a good idea when there are Titanic ships hanging in the sky.”

 _“Please, like you don’t know how to tight-beam.”_  

“Can we talk about it aloud?” Steve asked. He had a slightly pinched look.

“Down here, yes,” said the cat.

Tony made another sensor pass over the exposed trays that made up a good half of the walls and floor – yeah, plenty of interference here, and... not at all the sort he was expecting. Electrical grids gave off EM interference – _obviously_ – but this... this might have a solid basis for cooking up a shield that would keep annoying gods from being able to hear their names spoken. Had he learned about this, when he’d been hooked into the library nexus? There was so _much_ in there – he’d known it all, and then he’d only been able to take a fraction of it with him...

 _Processor upgrades in the near future,_ Tony promised himself. It would have to do.

“Why didn’t you take us this way before?” Steve asked. He sounded annoyed.

The cat was unperturbed. “Do not think these tunnels free of risk. Speak, mortal.”

Tony rolled his eyes, and began talking, filling Steve in: city breaking, time-loop-making machine, underpinnings of the universe, yada yada. He left out the part where Kuan-Yin had looked like his mother. That was... not something that really needed discussing, right now. Not with Steve. Sarah Rogers had left Steve orphaned at a far younger age than Tony had lost his own parents; when Steve had spoken of her – only twice, in the entire time Tony had known him – he’d made her sound like a saint.

It didn’t take long. When he’d finished, Steve was frowning. “You want to go back in time.”

 _“I’ve already gone back in time,”_ Tony corrected. _“Already... will have gone back in time. What future-me did in the past has led to me being here now and able to go back,_ but _– this time...”_

He knew what he was gambling with. He’d spent far too many sleepless nights running the numbers for another multiverse. And _yet_... if he could just get it _right_ – he wouldn’t have to change much. Hell, play his cards right, and he might just be able to infuriate Schrödinger - change the outcomes that he didn’t already know.

Earth.

He didn’t _know_ about Earth. Which, ordinarily, didn’t mean that it didn’t exist, because he wasn’t a solipsist _. But_ this was time-travel talking about right now – Schrödinger’s exasperated question actually had a fully realizable answer. Earth was the cat: dead, alive, or covered in zombies, he was the observer that mattered. And he didn’t know that a time-traveller from the future _hadn’t_ put in something to extremis’ base code to make its victims’ brains go dormant instead of dead.

Although the nuclear launch –

He could have been hallucinating that bit –

_ Okay, maybe that’s reaching.  _

“Do you know what it was you changed?” Steve asked. “Future-you, I mean.”

He felt his lips curl in a smirk that Steve couldn’t see. A physical reaction, rather than mental – so he was still human enough to do that, lack of soul and computer for a brain and all. Did he know? All the _‘why me’_ s and the ‘ _how’_ s – okay, not all of them. He could still remember what the norns had told him: _if not you, then another_.

But that only worked once. The second time...

_“Oh, yeah. I know.”_

 

 

The cat was in his arms – Steve would have preferred to use just one arm, if he had to carry it at all, but whenever he tried to shift an arm away it hissed at him – and then it wasn’t. They were underground still, travelling on the ‘grid’ – whatever that was – so he couldn’t see immediately if there were any other changes, but there had to be some. Unless the cat had just decided to leave, which couldn’t be ruled out.

 _“Heads up,”_ said Tony, and, _“Back off. What’re you...”_ Steve had backed off, and Tony was now talking to the wall, holding his hands out about a foot away and moving them back and forth.

“If it’s not going to blow up, we should keep moving,” Steve said.

_“Don’t take it for granted.”_

“I wasn’t.” He hadn’t been – he had his shield in hand, and he was ready to pull Tony away.

 _“Hah.”_ But Tony let his hands fall. _“Not right now. Maybe in half an hour. Come on.”_

He started walking again and Steve followed, picking his own way as carefully as Tony was – mostly, trying not to step except exactly where Tony had, and ducking whenever cabling or solid beam partially obstructed the way. Half the floor was weirdly glowing metal and _that_ he could avoid on his own, but the cat had directed him to avoid a few other places which he hadn’t pinpointed anything off about. Hopefully Tony had known what was wrong with them.

“So what was it?” he asked.

_“I got myself back.”_

“From the reality we were stuck in?” Steve asked. Where he’d been injured – dying. And after that, had taken extremis.

 _Oh,_ he thought, getting it. If Tony had gone back in time and infected himself with extremis, some version he’d cooked up _here_ , then no wonder he hadn’t turned into a zombie.

 _“...not exactly,”_ Tony muttered. _“We were – I was stuck, with you. A different you.”_ He paused, giving himself a boost over a mess of cabling with the repulsors; Steve leapt it instead. _“It was the one thing I never could work out – you don’t know how far out I was stuck, Steve. I could tell you, but the human mind isn’t built to comprehend distances that vast.”_

“I thought you... built a bridge back.”

 _“I did. Flicked it on, it tossed me out – in some random direction. I had no clue where to point the damn thing, Steve. And instead it just_ happened _to toss me back from_ exactly _where I’d left? So that the rest of you didn’t even realize I’d been gone? I’d need to teach you about hyperoperations just to tell you exactly how miniscule the odds were. The chances that entire Earth would have spontaneously undergone nuclear fusion before I could get back were greater than the chance that I could randomly pick the correct angles and distances. Hell, with the mock-up I was working with, I didn’t even have the precision to choose a correct angle – I wasn’t trying to get to Earth, just somewhere that_ wasn’t there.”

There was a wealth of emotion in his voice that the armour’s speakers weren’t stripping out, intentionally or unintentionally. Anger and hatred that spelled bad news for Loki – and _loathing_ , which might spell very bad news for _them_. They were in the middle of a war directed by somebody definitely _not_ Loki, and extremis... extremis hadn’t been Loki, either. Sure, Loki had turned up and made life difficult for SHIELD in many annoying little ways – but extremis itself...

“Okay,” said Steve. Best way to get Tony to focus was to bring his attention back to the problem. “So... you’re going to find your...self, the past you, and punt him back to Earth?”

Tony huffed a laugh. _“Yeah. With a helping of extremis. I’m pretty sure I had it in my head, all along – it just... wasn’t activated, not until it came into direct contact with the home-brewed version. At least not in this iteration.” That_ sounded speculative. _“Not entirely.”_

“But if you change things, then the loop might not stabilize.”

 _“It might not stabilize_ this _round,”_ said Tony. _“I change things this round, and for the better – next time around, I do the exact same thing as I did this time. Presto – history fixed for the better.”_

“Or everything could explode,” Steve said dryly. Shenzhen... the casualty counts... God, if they really had a chance to save those people... but how many other lives would they be risking? Tony had _just_ said it - _the human mind isn’t built to comprehend distances that vast._ He’d never been one to shy from odds, not to potentially save the living – but these people were already _dead_. “Give me the odds, Tony.”

 _“I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell what iteration this is – all the previous information is overwritten when this one is destroyed.”_ So they could save everyone and they’d still have died. It just would have been forgotten by the universe.

“Take a guess.”

 _“Honestly? If I had to say from the damage to the city alone – pretty bad odds,”_ Tony admitted. _“But that’s skewed by the invasion, and Kuan-Yin made it sound like the invasion was the bigger threat. On its own, I think the odds are in my favour. I only need to get it right_ once _.”_

 “You only need to screw it up once, too.”

 _“I need to not change_ too _much – that’s a pretty large amount of wiggle room. Each iteration can bring me closer to the goal – I just need to set it in motion. Or keep it in motion – what are the odds that I already started down this path? Pretty high.”_

“That’s playing dominoes with the lives of every being in the multiverse at stake.” Steve shook his head. “Jesus, Tony – ”

_“It’s not like dominoes – ”_

“No, it’s not, because you can’t look me in the eye and say you know where the pieces are placed. Tony, I hate what Hansen and Borjigin did with extremis just as much as you do. But the people it killed are _dead._ You can’t prioritize them over the living.” He reached ahead and grabbed Tony’s arm. “What is past is _past._ ”

Tony looked back, the faceplate polished and utterly non-illuminating. _“Come on, time to get up top before these things really do blow up on us. That way,”_ he pointed, and a part of the wall slid aside, revealing steps up.

They led to another building, but this one wasn’t in the same mostly-intact condition as the library. Chunks of stone and metal had been ripped out of the walls and floors – attached chairs or desks, perhaps – and thrown about. They were fortunate that there wasn’t more wreckage to make their way more difficult – it didn’t seem like there had been much in the way of furniture, at least not on this floor. Actually, it almost reminded him of the lobby of Stark Tower – polished, open, airy, and subtly luxurious despite the ugly ostentation of its outside.

 _“Two-fifty meter dash to it,”_ Tony said, pointing out the doors. Twilight was falling outside, lit by flashes from above; Tony had already dimmed his armour’s lights to blend in, although from the tint of light coming through the windows, Steve was pretty sure they were one-way. Still, it didn’t hurt to be cautious; he was keeping to what cover he could find, too. _“Cloak and fly.”_

“Ready when you are,” Steve said, even though he wasn’t. He needed more time to talk Tony out of doing this. He needed – he needed _Bruce_ here, an outside scientific objective that he could trust, because Tony’s judgement in this matter was the furthest thing from uncompromised.

_“On three – ”_

They slipped through the doors and zipped around the corner, pulling Gs not quite as bad as when Tony had started evading in the middle of a firefight, but still worse than any other bit of flying Steve had done with Tony – maybe not passing out or puking from that exercise had convince Tony that Steve could handle a bit more. And despite the fact that they were in the middle of a war zone and he was on the verge of pissed off at Tony it was still _exhilarating_ , close call against a building and all – exhilarating, and all too brief, since they were going something closer to Tony’s usual speeds. Tony pulled them up into a hover a few dozen feet off the ground beside the building that they were presumably looking for.

 _“Well, crap,”_ Tony said over the comm. They weren’t the only ones interested in the building – a veritable swarm of chitauri were set up around it, hammering away at it with everything from a sort of energy cannon to actual, extremely lethal-looking hammers – if not quite so lethal-looking as Mjolnir. If they were doing any damage at all, the building wasn’t showing it on the outside. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any way in at all, although Steve was aware of just how little that meant.

“Scan for entrances?”

 _“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,”_ and yeah, Steve had probably deserved that. _“Damn it. Maybe if I can get a closer connection...”_

Tony eased them over the foot soldiers – and, possibly more importantly, beneath the shadow of the ship above them. It wasn’t one of the black ovaloids that he’d seen so many of before – this one definitely looked more chitauri, all scales and skeletal curves. Only gliders had come through the portal in New York, but Tony _had_ said there was a mothership. Maybe this wasn’t one, but the way it covered the sky made it seem plausible.

 _“Okay,”_ Tony breathed over the comms as they lowered, gently, towards the roof. _“Don’t fry my brai – oh, whoops,”_ he finished at a more normal volume, as they dropped through the roof and into the building itself. _“Uh. That was easier than expected.”_

It was almost empty inside – a barren floor, except for a large, thin slab of black rock standing upright in the centre, much like a doorway. A single figure stood beside it, easily recognizable: Tripitaka, although he was wearing different clothing and he seemed, somehow, less... _small._ Not in any physical sense, but there was something – something very different.

 _“What the hell are you doing here?”_ Tony barked, as he lowered them to the floor and disengaged the mag-lock.

“Helping you,” said Tripitaka serenely. Maybe _that_ was it. Tripitaka had meditated a lot on their trip – and he liked to _play_ at serenity – but...

This might have been the first time that Steve actually thought he was at peace with himself, completely unafraid despite the army outside hammering on the walls.

And they were still hammering. From the inside, the walls out were transparent, barely tinted like one-way glass. But the energy bursts from the chitauri cannons weren’t audible, and from here it was clear that they were having absolutely no effect.

Tripitaka caught the line of his gaze and said, “Maklu may have fallen back to the inner defences, but those are very strong.”

Tony had thrown his hands up in the air. _“_ Why _would anyone think you could be of help?”_

“I’m not capable of aiding in the defence, but I have spent the last two months studying the links – that is to say, the nanites and their networks,” said Tripitaka, “and I’m given to understand that your past survival may depend upon granting yourself a primitive version of those. Your access to the library nexus indicated strongly that you aren’t fully familiar with the base code.”

 _“Doesn’t matter, I wrote an upgrade while I was in,”_ Tony dismissed. _“And patches. Dumbed-down understanding can come later.”_

Steve wandered over to the large stone doorway – carefully stepping between the pair of them.

“But your past self clearly did not have that upgrade,” said Tripitaka. “And even if it was, that would be transferring information into the past. You need a more basic version, one that already exists in this time. I have it here.”

_“Like hell.”_

“Tony,” Steve interrupted. Tripitaka had been here – two months? Maybe he knew what he was talking about... but... Steve gestured at the doorway. “This is it?”

_“...uh-huh.”_

“The Font of Time,” said Tripitaka softly. “It would be unwise for you to touch it.”

Steve shot him a look. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

 _“Only guy going in there is me,”_ agreed Tony, tilting his helmet back to gaze up at the Font – it was impressively tall, even if it was dwarfed by the enormity of the room they were in. _“Two trips. One to grab me – if I recall, I’ll be pretty out of it – and another to put me back. I’ll dose me with nanites in-between – probably not the best idea to be trying to do it in the middle of unreality.”_ He hesitated, and then stepped past Steve.  

Steve stopping him by grabbing onto the armour hard enough that if Tony stepped forward, he’d pull Steve into it along with him. “Tony. Hang on.”

 _“Uh, hello?”_ Tony gestured with his other arm to the walls. _“Crisis? Army outside?”_

“Not gonna be helped by you jumping in and making things worse,” Steve said firmly.

 _“Argue about this once I figure out if it’s even possible,”_ Tony said. _“I may just get lost inside.”_

He was coming back. He wasn’t lying about that, Steve was sure – he _hoped_ he was sure, but he let go anyway. “Don’t get lost.”

 _“Stop worrying so much, Steve. If I_ really _fuck up, you’ll never even know.”_ He stepped into the Font – _though_ it; it was not quite six inches wide – without looking back.

Steve looked at Tripitaka, and he felt a little sick. “What happens if he changes things? Just something small – not enough to break everything.”

Tripitaka looked back steadily. “It would still be another iteration, St – Captain Rogers,” he amended, with a grace that Steve hadn’t thought he had. “The Font can only endure so much.”

“Do you know if it’s close to breaking?”

Tripitaka shook his head. “We – souled beings – cannot look upon unreality. It doesn’t end well.”

“He’s going to risk everything,” Steve muttered. _Everything_ everything, he thought, because it was too ridiculous not to think it – it wasn’t the _everything_ that people meant when they said that line in films; it wasn’t a company, or money, or a world. It was, quite literally, the entirety of their multiverse.

 _Maybe not everything_ , he thought morbidly. There were, after all, other clusters out there – like the one Tony was currently attempting to retrieve his former self from. Hopefully, before that former self went too crazy – except that if he was never crazy – there’d be no zombies. No Fin Fang Foom, no reason to go to Maklu.

If all those people hadn’t died – but, no, that wasn’t right. Maybe there _was_ some way that they _could_ have been saved; Tony could write into the nanites a compulsion to go to Maklu, or something. Although if he could, then – “Why not just explain everything to his past self? Then when he does it, the next time around, it would – or, maybe, the time after that,” he said, thinking it through aloud.

“Conservation of information,” said Tripitaka. “One can reach back and move information – matter – from place to place within the same time, but the majority of this loop takes place outside of any central node. Those places cannot have timelines created from unreality imposed upon them – it will not hold; they’re not strong enough to avoid being consumed by the unreality. Within Maklu, the structure is more stable – he may learn of and act upon the loop from here, because this place can withstand it. An outer realm would never survive having something such as the Font upon it.”

Steve rubbed at his forehead. “Back up. You thought he should still put nanites in himself – nanites programmed with _your_ help. That’s something from the future.”

“No, this place is currently far back in time,” said Tripitaka, tilting his head at the walls – walls that the Chitauri were still trying to knock down, unsuccessfully. But all of their efforts were... not bouncing off, Steve realized. There was no backlash – the energy was going somewhere, but into the _wrong_ building. They were in a different time. “Standard Makluan links – ones stripped down to their most base code, which shall barely be enough to prevent the links that this ‘Fin Fang Foom’ tampered with from destroying his mind – they are very common here. Half the buildings are made of them, and this one is no different. They can be provided as they are, _without_ providing any input from his own future. _That,_ it is essential he not have until upon a world that can support it.”

He still wasn’t sure he followed. “That seems like cheating.”

“Yet it has already happened at least once – did he show any future knowledge before you reached Maklu?”

“No.” And then, he had to admit – “Not that I’d have known.” Hell, if Tony could program himself to think things – maybe _Tony_ hadn’t known.  

“Then we have a very good chance of stabilizing the loop. If he insists on breaking conservation, that will change quickly. You must make him see reason,” said Tripitaka, and of course _that_ was when –

 

_He’s been here before._

_He doesn’t have a perfect memory of it. Extremis had backed up all his existing memories, copying over what data it could retrieve – hell, it must have been doing that since before Alternatony wiped his memory, all unknown to him – but human memories are fallible in a way that extremis’ storage options aren’t. And these memories had been twisted and shifted by pain and terror as his soul tried to rip itself apart and his mind tried to keep up._

_That’s not how the Gap looks to him now. Now it’s just... empty. Blank. He’d freaked out back when he’d stood on a dying world, but this isn’t dying; this is how it always had been._

There, _he tries, thinking of that other cluster, dying. It may be outside this one – but this is the Gap: and the void exists around everything. He feels the focus of the Font shift and settle... on him again. Great. That wasn’t useful._

_It won’t take him_ places _, he quickly realizes. Of course. Font of_ Time _, after all – it can’t settle upon a place. But he has himself to use as a reference._ The last time I was here _, he thinks instead, and with a flash of orange there is himself there – a void within the Void, some similar part of himself, like a copy, and he grabs himself and –_

 

\- Tony tumbled back out of the Font, from the same side he’d entered, pulling himself along by the arm.

But not, Steve was pretty sure, the self that he’d meant to grab.

Anthony looked terrible. His clothes – those ridiculous, ridiculous clothes – were scorched and torn, and his cape had been mangled so badly that only a few tattered shreds still hung from his shoulders. The half-mask that had always covered his face had been ripped away, and the skin and eye beneath it were a bloody, ruined mess. He was shaking too badly to stand and Steve dove forward to catch him as Tony caught himself on repulsors.

“This is new,” Anthony whispered from cracked, bloodied lips as Steve lowered him to the ground, half-cradling him. His one good eye was open wide, painfully wide, like he couldn’t bear the thought of closing it, and his gaze moved constantly, never pausing for a moment. “I miss the stars.”

 _“Oh, Jesus,”_ said Tony, setting back onto his feet.

“A – Tony? Can you hear me?” Steve asked, trying to check that he wasn’t further injuring him – as beat up as he was, it was hard to tell, especially with how badly he was shaking. Anthony’s focus moved over him and beyond, refusing to settle. “Tony, you’re safe.”

 _“Not exactly,”_ Tony muttered, and then, louder – in an almost pitying tone, _“I take it his investigations didn’t go well – if this is the same one. Does seem like a pretty big coincidence if it’s not.”_

God, had he been trapped in there, like this, for that long? “Can your nanites fix this?” Steve asked, looking between them.

“His soul is beyond repair,” Tripitaka said, his own gaze very remote, like he was concentrating on something that the rest of them couldn’t see. There was no distress in his voice – it was as if he was completely beyond caring, whether it happened to Anthony or Tony or even himself. He was so serene that Steve hated him all over again.

“Tony doesn’t have a soul and he does just fine,” Steve snapped.

 _“Great. You got an idea for how to get it out of him? Because I don’t,”_ said Tony.

“It is usually considered impossible,” Tripitaka agreed.

Anthony turned his head closer against Steve’s stomach. “I miss climbing mountains,” he mumbled. “Before they started throwing me off of them.”

“We’ll take him back to Earth, then,” said Steve, trying to rub a gentle hand over Anthony’s arm – the better arm. It didn’t seem to do a thing to soothe him. “He can at least get proper medical care.”

 _“I don’t remember seeing what he’s seen, but I remember my reaction,”_ said Tony. _“He’s not shaking because he’s injured, Steve. Honestly... it’d be kinder to kill him.”_

Like Hell. “We are _not_ killing him.”

 _“I knew you’d say that,”_ Tony remarked, and stepped back through the Font.

“Please,” begged Anthony, and Steve couldn’t tell which he was asking for.

“We’re gonna get you treatment,” said Steve, easing him fully to the floor and shrugging out of his outer uniform top so he could roll it up for a pillow. He looked to Tripitaka. “Give me your outer robe.” Tripitaka took it off and handed it over without objection, and Steve draped it over Anthony. It wasn’t ideal – the floor was cool, too – it was the best they could do for now.

Anthony reached up, then, and grabbed Steve’s arm with surprising strength. “You don’t know,” he hissed, pulling Steve down. “You’re just as bad as them.”

Gently, Steve disentangled himself, grabbing Anthony’s hand with his own, instead. “I’m gonna get you help,” he promised, and Anthony laughed at him, creaky and horrible. “You’re – ”

 

 

Before that, _he thinks, and –_ oh. _This is familiar – his previous self, riding a beam of light that is disintegrating around him as unreality rips it apart. He’s staring back along the path, at something that Tony can’t see – can’t comprehend, can’t be affected by, not anymore. So he doesn’t see as Tony grabs him – and,_ ah _, with the connection to the older armour’s systems comes the realization that his younger self has just passed out._

_Probably for the best. Tony pulls them back –_

 

 

\- Steve stopped himself as Tony fell back through again, but this time, the other’s armour was _definitely_ the right one. The image of Tony lying on his back in that suit of armour, unmoving and not breathing, was indelibly burned into his memories. And this armour was just as dented up as that one had been.

 _“Unconscious, that’s good,”_ Tony said, letting his past self not-quite drop to the floor. He made a pretty loud clatter anyway. _“And... breathing, that’s even better... oh. Goddamnit, JARVIS,”_ he muttered, and bowed his head.

Steve did likewise, a moment of mourning – broken, suddenly, as from far, far away there came a distant noise like thunder. It was not terribly loud, but there was an immensity to it that made it clear that its lack of volume was due to vast distance and not small magnitude. Outside, the small army besieging them didn’t seem to have heard it; they showed no reaction and just kept on hammering away. Soundlessly.

“What was that?” asked Steve. The answer was obvious – except that they were in an alien world, so maybe it wasn’t. He _hoped_ it wasn’t –

“The Enemy grows near,” said Tripitaka, tilting his head as if listening to something. “They’re not yet upon us, but we don’t have much longer.” He held out his hand, which had been empty a moment ago, and within it was a small wooden bowl containing perhaps a tablespoon of liquid silver – nanites. “I called these from the buildings around us while I waited here for you, after Kuan-Yin had shown me the way. I believe they will suit your purposes; they are intended to record and preserve information. I understand that your past self will become infected with a corrupted set of links, but these will be well-able to keep you and your memories intact despite any interference, and allow you to tread this road again.”

 _“Not the plan,”_ said Tony, kneeling down. He put one palm over the faceplate of the armour.

Steve shook his head. “Tony, hang on.”

 _“You heard him,”_ Tony replied tersely. _“We’re running out of time.”_

“You doing something hasty isn’t going to help.” Steve said, making sure to keep his tone even as he crossed over and grabbed Tony’s wrist – not quite putting out pressure to try to make him pull away. Not yet. 

Tony did that on his own, shaking Steve off at the same point. _“Steve, I’m trying to save lives here.”_

“You’re risking lives.”

 _“I know,”_ Tony acknowledged. _“But the odds are good – ”_

“They’re not,” Steve cut him off. “Look, I don’t like him and I know you hate him for a damn good reason. But it seems like he got a crash course in this. If you go around programming your past self to do things, it _won’t_ work. You can’t take knowledge back – you can only transfer matter.”

 _“_ He _tell you that?”_ Tony demanded.

“Yes.” Steve grimaced. “I don’t like it either, Tony. But just stop one moment to _listen._ ”

Tony leaned back on one knee, staring first at Steve with the Iron Man’s expressionless mask, then at Tripitaka. _“You think he knows what he’s talking about? You’re asking me to do the impossible. I sent information back last loop – you want me to duplicate what I did then_ and _not send back anything_ , _that’s not gonna work.”_

“Ah,” said Tripitaka. “Then you did not listen last loop.”

 _“Obviously,”_ said Tony. He raised his hands as if to be compromising – but his voice sure wasn’t; was it compromise or confrontation? The armour made it impossible to tell. _“And matter, information, they’re the same damn thing so I know he’s wrong – no, shut up!”_ he barked, cutting off Tripitaka, who had been about to speak. “ _Look, it’s dominoes – we’re somewhere in the middle. I_ told _you it was likely. One tiny change at a time, and when we get to a point where the consequences of_ not _sending back info are less than catastrophic – then I can stop. I will. I promise.”_

Steve laid his hand on top of Tony’s past self’s faceplate – where Tony had put his hand before: a clear warning. “Did you promise that last time around?”

The Iron Man armour stared back at him: unblinking, unflinching. Was Tony the same, inside of it?

“What is that point, Tony?” Steve asked softly, insistently. “What do you lose if this time is the last domino? Tell me what’s at stake.”

 _“Earth,”_ said Tony. _“At the very least, a hundred million lives.”_

“They’re already dead, Tony.”

_“Schrödinger’s Earth – they’re not dead unless we end it here. Come on, Steve – what I sent back last time, it was subtle. We’re close. Iterate a few more times – ”_

“How much is ‘a few’?”

Tony paused. Steve waited, almost holding his breath – if Tony _was_ going to start lying to him, now... now would be it.

But he didn’t. He stayed silent, instead. Steve shook his head. “With an army moving in each time – no. Tony, the risks – so long as there is _a_ risk, it’s unacceptable.”

Tony recoiled. _“Wow. I – wow. Never thought you’d be a ‘good of the many’ guy, Cap.”_

He didn’t know what that was a reference to, but he could get the meaning regardless. “You know I’m not. This is different, Tony. The people you’re trying to bring back are already dead, and I regret that, a lot, yes. But they’re gone. You can’t risk the living for the dead. Tony – give me the benefit of the doubt that I know what I’m talking about here when I say that _you have to let them go.”_

Tony stared at him for what felt like an age.

 _“I can’t, Steve,”_ he said softly, finally, letting his hand drop back onto to his past self’s armour – not upon the faceplate; but that was probably just symbolic. _“I have a chance to_ fix _this. I have to try.”_

Steve felt something chill inside him, some remnant of the ice. He set his jaw and stood. Jesus, how could Tony not _see?_ How had Steve missed that he might not? Thunder boomed again in the distance – not so far in the distance, now. It almost sounded like artillery fire. “I can’t let you do this.”

Tony looked up sharply. _“You can’t_ let _me do this?”_

“I can’t let you risk every _living_ person in this universe – in all these universes,” Steve said, and begged, “Please. I don’t want to have to stop you. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

Tony rose to his own feet. _“Funny, I thought that was my line.”_

Steve felt himself balance, shield ready – months of fighting zombies and super-zombies, and maybe he’d taken a few weeks off, but the serum never let him forget skills once learnt. Tony seemed to be waiting for something; he’d paused. Steve spared one last hope, but he wasn’t conceding... and Steve couldn’t afford to let Tony have the first blow, he knew _that_.

Thunder boomed again, and Steve attacked, shield leading.

It was his only hope of getting through the armour. He might be able to throw Tony, if he could get the proper leverage – but Tony could fly and, with extremis, easily catch himself mid-throw. Unarmed blows wouldn’t so much as make him blink. So Steve threw himself shield-first into the attack and scraped through a layer of nanites as Tony instinctively tried to blast him away with the repulsors – no effect on the shield, of course; it just reflected back at him.

Steve nearly got in another slice, but extremis had made Tony faster. Not super-zombie fast – thank God, or Steve really wouldn’t have had a chance in this fight. And he hated it, hated every step of it as he lashed out again and again, whipping the shield’s razor-sharp edges around and slicing whatever part of the armour came within reach, driving Tony backward – away from his past self, and Anthony, and the Font – until finally Tony flipped himself up into the air.

 _“Jesus, Steve,”_ Tony said, and he sounded _pissed_.

“Stand down,” Steve told him.

 _“Would you?”_ Tony demanded, and vanished beneath the effect of the invisibility cloak.

Steve parried a repulsor blast with his shield and whipped around, dodging invisible grabs. He’d trained, since getting his ass handed to him by the other Natasha fighting in the dark – not as often as he’d have liked, but the serum didn’t forget. Tony could cut off sight but moving fast, in metal, made sound, and Steve could hear it easily, could parse the displacement of air almost as well as he could parse visible cues – and Tony wasn’t expecting him to be able to do so. He carved a chunk of armour off of one of Tony’s shoulders and his shield came away with a long bloody streak upon it, and Steve grit his teeth and flattered himself to the ground, dodging again and –

Pain erupted in his right thigh as he failed to block a brief, too-swift blast of Tony’s lasers – a single shot, quicker than the repulsors, but more lethal, and that was bad. He had to end this quickly, because he didn’t want to hurt Tony and if Tony didn’t mind hurting _him_ then his odds went from bad to terrible. Adrenaline covered the pain a moment later and he leapt over another blast, spinning a one-eighty in the air and catching some still-invisible part of Tony with a kick, then another slice of his shield – and then shock radiated up his leg, an electric current that he could not fight, could only endure with grit teeth. His leg muscles wouldn’t respond, and he could almost compensate – but not well enough.

An invisible gauntlet grabbed him by the shoulder, dropping more armour – more nanites, more electricity – onto him, and Steve’s shield fell from a suddenly nerveless hand. His legs could no longer support his own weight – never-mind pain, his limbs simply would not obey his commands. _Up!_ he ordered himself, but he kept falling toward the floor anyway.

A crimson boot reappeared from thin air and kicked the shield away, making it skitter across the floor, far out of his grasp. Steve gasped for breath – his lungs weren’t keen on following directions, either. Dimly, through the lingering shocks, he felt something hard and metal close around his wrists.

 _“This is really stupid, Steve,”_ Tony said, and he sounded angry, an anger punctuated by the artificial thunder that now rumbled continuously outside. _“You’re fighting me, really? On this?_ Like _this?”_

Steve struggled for breath, managing to get a wheeze in as he watched Tony go back to kneeling over his still-motionless past self. Feeling was returning to his body with a generous helping of pins and needles – he tried to pull his arms forward, to lever himself up, but Tony had bound them behind his back with something – had bound his feet together, too.

“Tony,” he gasped. “Don’t.”

_“Saving people’s lives is the right thing to do.”_

“You can’t trade... living for dead...”

_“Not what I’m doing.”_

“What you’re _risking!”_

Tony stood, hauling his past self up over one shoulder – he was done. Ready to go back through the portal – ready to gamble with the lives of countless innocents. Worse than gamble – by sending back information he was going to destabilize the loop further, but he was flat-out refusing to consider the dangers! _“You don’t really believe that.”_

Steve glared at him. “Tony, for God’s sake, _stop_ this! Pull your head out of your ass and stop making this about your own guilt! You can’t do this!”

 _“Then stop me,”_ said Tony, and he waited there while Steve glared, impotent and furious. Finally, Tony tilted his head to the side. _“You – huh. Funny.”_

“You think this is _funny?”_ Steve snarled. Tony was sarcasm and quips and black humour in the face of death, but this was so much more than one life.

 _“Kinda,”_ said Tony. _“It hasn’t even occurred to you, has it?”_ He turned his head to the side – toward Tripitaka, kneeling serenely beside Anthony, who was trying to sit up and shaking too badly to do so on his own. _“What about you?”_

“I will not stain my soul again. I will not be a coward,” said Tripitaka calmly, letting Anthony cling to his hands and mutter nonsense at him – nonsense that Steve could barely hear over the pulse of blood in his ears, he was so angry. “I will not commit evil to avoid evil.”

 _“Huh. Steve? You sure? Come on, I know you heard him when he used it. Super-soldier hearing – I’ve read all the notes on you and I’ve seen you in action. There’s no way you missed it. Come on.”_ Tony held his free arm – the one he wasn’t using to steady his past-self – out at his side, the universal body language – _come on, take your best shot._ _“You think this is really wrong? You want to stop me? Then_ stop me _.”_

Steve’s breath caught again in his throat, and this time it had absolutely nothing to do with being electrocuted.

He could stop Tony. Steve could drop him where he stood – and keep him down. Keep repeating the mantra that Tripitaka had used to torture Tony into compliance – and he’d have to _keep_ repeating it; Tony was too brave to be kept down by fear alone. Not for this.  

Hell, they’d been beating each other up just a moment ago – Tony’s armour was still growing back over his shoulder-wound, going slowly because it was repairing flesh at the same time. Tony had electrocuted him to bring him down – and if Steve hadn’t screamed, it had still been damn painful.

And it was brief and still different.

 _“Never figured Captain America for a coward,”_ said Tony, and he turned back to the Font. Steve stared at him – five steps from it, then four – each one a missed chance and if he didn’t decide, the decision was going to be taken from him. It was unthinkable, and it was his one damn chance –

“No, no no no,” cried Anthony, tottering upright with Tripitaka’s help – and, with a snap of his fingers, throwing a shimmering yellow forcefield over the Font. Tony jerked back just before he ran into it faceplate-first. “No. You do _not_ do that to him.”

 _“Oh for – you’re crazy, and you’re half-dead,”_ said Tony, sounding exasperated as he rounded on his sorcerous counterpart – who, Steve winced to see, looked like he was about to fall over any second. Anthony had been horribly injured – he shouldn’t be on his feet, and Steve strained all the harder at his cuffs – then gave up on that plan and started inch-worming his way toward his shield. If he couldn’t break them, then he could cut them off –

Anthony didn’t back down, and Tony raised a hand, palm glowing in warning. _“If I hated fighting Steve, I’ve got far fewer reservations about you.”_

“You’re young,” said Anthony, and he threw his own hand out, slamming Tony a good hundred feet back until he hit a wall so hard that the entire place rang like the inside of a bell. His past self tumbled from his grip half-way there and lay sprawled upon the floor like a broken doll. “In the sea of broken stars, there is _power_.”

 _“And you’re crazy,”_ Tony snapped, standing and vanishing midsentence. Beams of laser-light pinpointed his location a moment later, only to be thwarted by another golden shield, reflecting off at such an angle that Steve had to roll frantically side-ways to avoid losing his leg at the knee. He started wriggling faster toward his shield – Anthony was in no shape to keep this up. His shield of magic was already vanishing beneath the onslaught, and with a cry, he fell, just as Steve reached his shield.

“No!” Steve yelled, and Anthony’s body... turned into a bunch of purple smoke.

 _“You have a lot to learn about the light in the mind,”_ Anthony’s voice came, sing-song, from everywhere and nowhere. Steve couldn’t see either of them now – couldn’t hear them, either, over the increasingly high-pitched whine that was echoing within the chamber. He grit his teeth and screwed his eyes shut as he manoeuvred himself awkwardly, trying to get the right leverage so he could break his bonds with the shield – no easy task with all limbs bound. And then some... _things_... were reaching up from the floor, writhing black arms with shrivelled hands – one reached down, grabbing his shield, and he nearly snarled at it until he realized it was holding it out and steady for him.

“Thanks,” Steve muttered, unable to hear his own voice over the ringing, and he cut the bindings at his wrists – and then had to cut them _again_ , this time immediately wrenching his hands apart as far as he could, to prevent the bindings from fusing right back together. When he had his wrists apart he tore the stuff from each one at a time, then took his shield from the arm and freed his feet, simultaneously trying to figure out where to aim for as soon as he _was_ free. He still had no clue where either Anthony or Tony were.

 _“It figures I would be fucking annoying in any world,”_ said Tony’s voice, cutting through the ringing and bringing back the silence – but only for a moment.

Anthony started laughing – a terrible, despairing laugh, intermixed with giggles of hysterical glee. “Got you!” he crowed, and, “Petards and look, _hoist_ , engineering in action! No such thing as _magic_ ,” he mocked, and Tony appeared from nowhere at the side of the room and slammed into the floor with a terrible, sickening _crunch_ of metal. He didn’t move afterward.

Anthony reappeared, too – about a foot away from Steve, and Steve jumped. “Me’s usually do like you’s better,” he commented absently. Yellow fire was flickering about his hands – and jumping from his hands to the nearby ones growing from the floor. They leaned it toward him, like he was a warm fire on a cold day.

“Oh, God,” said Steve, staring. Tony’s armour – it was crushed like a tin can, and there was blood leaking from the midsection. “Is he dead?”

“We’re all dead,” said Anthony, beginning to shiver again – abruptly, he sat down upon the floor; he’d have collapsed bonelessly to it if Steve hadn’t reflexively caught his arm and eased him down. Steve didn’t kneel down to keep him upright – he couldn’t take his eyes off of Tony.

The building shook, and a rumble of thunder went off right outside. Steve looked up and out. The chitauri had moved aside, making room for another division – more chitauri, or different aliens, Steve couldn’t tell: they were all taller than the average chitauri, but their features were hidden beneath robes and armour, and fearsome masks – unless those were actually their faces, stuck in hideous grimaces. Steve hoped not. They had drawn something that was unmistakably a cannon up one of the roads, and as he watched, it fired again, pounding the side of the building and making the entire structure tremble.

“Captain Rogers,” called Tripitaka. He was kneeling beside Tony – past-Tony, who was still unconscious and stuck within the armour. “We do not have much time. I cannot lift him; you must aid me.”

“Within the fire is candlelight,” said Anthony, hunching inward upon himself. His summoned arms crumbled away into patterns of dust, still reaching toward him.

Steve glanced between Anthony – and Tony, oh, God. _Please let him be alive_. But the building shook again, and he jogged over to Tripitaka instead.

“We need to send him back,” said Steve, picking Tony’s past self up and carrying him over to the Font. He wished – if he could have gotten the armour faceplate open without damaging it irreparably, he would have. But he couldn’t. “How do I operate the Font?”

Tony had known without having to be told. He'd probably just downloaded the knowledge straight into his brain.

“You do not,” said Tripitaka absently, sitting down cross-legged before the font and gesturing for Steve to place Tony beside him; reluctantly, Steve did so. “I shall do so, as soon as I finish removing nanites that Tony already placed, and replacing them with ones in sync with his timeline.”

Steve stared at him.

He’d _changed_ , but –

“This is my task,” Tripitaka said.

Steve shook his head. “No. I can’t ask you to do this.”

“You’re not,” said Tripitaka. He still sounded serene, as he placed his hands on the armour’s chest, closing his eyes and becoming nearly as still as a statue himself.

“You know what it’ll do to you!” said Steve, regretting a moment later the volume of his voice as he looked over at Anthony. But Anthony didn’t seem to notice – he was curled up into a ball, clutching Tripitaka’s over-robe around him and rocking back and forth. Steve knew he ought to go to him – but he couldn’t leave Tripitaka, leave _anyone,_ to this...

“It may not have a chance,” said Tripitaka philosophically. “I am but half-finished here, and I believe we are out of time.”

The building shook again – this time, from the opposite direction. Steve turned – the aliens had gotten another one of those massive cannons set up, this one to pound it from the other side. They weren’t unencumbered, there – at their rear, they were getting attacked in turn by figures that Steve couldn’t quite make out – but it was clear what their objective was. There was another round of doubled, shaking _booms,_ and then both guns fired in tandem. With an aching wrench, a long crack ran up each side of the building, meeting at the top. 

Steve jogged over to Anthony, hauled him up, and dragged him over to Tripitaka – Anthony didn’t even seem to notice. Then he went to Tony – Tony, lying still and broken, his armour cracked and... he was breathing, Steve realized, recognizing the sound in the silence between cannon-shots. The armour had broken open, and Steve could hear him breathing. Very slowly – so slowly that ordinary human sight would not have been able to pick it out – those broken edges were regrowing, shifting and repairing. Anthony _hadn’t_ killed him.

“Please don’t try it again,” Steve half-ordered him, half-prayed, and carefully picked him up and carried him back over, not too near his past self, but within reachable distance. Tony had to be out of it; he didn’t twitch, although Steve _knew_ he must have done more damage in moving him.

“Keep working,” said Steve. “I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”

If he died here, without bringing the cure for extremis back – maybe Earth was doomed.

_Just have to not die here, then._

“Anthony, can you set up a shield around us?” Steve asked, as the cannons fired again. There were now craters in each side of the wall – they weren’t yet through, but those were _awfully_ big dents...

“ _Seraphim’s blades_ ,” said Anthony, and he uncurled an arm just enough to make a grandiose gesture, sending shining white scythes of magic arcing toward one wall. It shattered outward, each spike exploding into fire like napalm, covering dozens of alien soldiers and turning them into a screaming, panicking mob.

But outside of that mob, there were more soldiers who hadn’t gotten splashed, and they shoved forward with brutal efficiency – impaling the still-screaming wounded on the ends of long weapons that they withdrew and then fired. Steve stepped forward and swatted the energy blasts aside with his shield, as beside him Anthony yelped and conjured up a delicate fall of snow. Or at least it looked like snow. It didn’t seem to be having any effect on their attackers, at least. More were coming through the hole in the wall that Anthony had made, slowed by the corpses – and still-living, still-twitching bodies – of their comrades; Steve arced his shield toward the first half-dozen and flipped sideways to draw fire from the enemies now coming up – draw and evade, as he flipped up and back and caught his shield. Just in time – he’d taken out weapons and probably more of the enemy than he deserved from that throw, but not all of the others had fired at him. Tony – both past and present – had taken several, as Tripitaka ducked down behind him.

“Anthony, a little help here!” Steve begged. He could catch only glimpses of the other side, enough to know that the fighting had gotten closer – but the cannon was still firing, if at a slower rate.

“ _Sons of Thunder / Daughters of Storm / Lend to me now / your mortal form!”_ cried Anthony, and lighting flickered over him – flickered faster and faster, until he was a brilliant spot of it that Steve couldn’t look at, energy arcing off of him with thunderous cracks. One hit the shield straight-on and bounced, connecting with the enemies’ and turning them into more shrieking, screaming, burning corpses-to-be – and draining Anthony of his temporarily summoned power. He slumped over side-ways – not unconscious, but staring straight ahead unblinking.

“The next person who steps forward dies!” Steve roared at the aliens standing behind those corpses. “Take my advice – let someone else go first!”

They stepped back, instead – and behind them, up a path, another group was rolling forward something that looked a lot like the earlier cannon, except with three barrels instead of one, and some sort of semi-transparent shield around the front of it.

“Take your best shot,” he invited them. He wished he knew what was happening with the cannon behind him. It hadn’t fired in a while – had Maklu’s defenders seized that position? – but if he looked away, that would be an invitation those in front of him would _not_ be able to ignore.

Overhead, a dragon roared. The infantry snapped their rifles upward – Steve took advantage of their own distraction and threw his shield, taking out four of them as he dove forward, getting a look at what was overhead on the roll. _Not_ just a dragon – an entire choir of them sang out, their voices together sounding like the Chief Magistrate’s: a great church organ, an orchestra, the largest symphony in the world. One plunged down directly toward them from the clouds, a thousand-foot line of green fire washing from its mouth and over the hovering chitauri warship; the ship immediately began to list to one side. Two more dragons flew low – and Steve barely got back in time before they breathed upon the cannon and the troops assembled around it, sending gouts of fire through the broken wall.

He _didn’t_ manage to get out of the way of the cannon exploding, not entirely. The edge of the shockwave hurled him right past Tripitaka, and his clumsy attempt at a roll didn’t dispel all of the force of the landing. Behind his battle, another had been fought – Steve didn’t know who had won, but the cannon there was destroyed as well; and up the street was coming a charge of horse, with Yulong right at the front.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Steve swore, the relief almost like another adrenaline boost.

A chitauri tried to gut Yulong with the sharp end of one of those energy weapons, and the dragon-horse grabbed with his teeth, tossed it aside, and then kicked the chitauri’s head in. Steve turned back, watching the ebb and flow of fighting – there seemed to be more foot soldiers, now; the tide of battle had pushed the infantry this way. Overhead, enemy ships were beginning to fire back; enormous, scaled corpses fell from the sky, and draconic roaring was now mixed with unmistakable screams of pain and fear.

“Tripitaka, how much longer?” Steve demanded, moving back over. Tony was – Tony was just beginning to stir; extremis had begun to work faster, although it was still a far cry from the speed at which he usually rebuilt or disassembled the armour. But his wounds, at least, were beginning to close over with metallic scabbing. Anthony, however, was a gibbering wreck – unless the nonsense syllables he was muttering had some arcane meaning. Since they didn’t _seem_ to be producing any magic, however...

“I am close to done,” said Tripitaka distractedly. “He was quite thorough.” He spared a moment, however, to glance at the sky himself. “The Emperor himself,” he murmured, and bowed with profound respect. “The mortal realm has come to the defence of Heaven.”

Steve glanced in the same direction Tripitaka had. From the east, a light was growing, bright enough to be mistaken for the rising sun, had not the sun already begun its westward descent; and more dragons streamed forth, a seemingly endless number of reinforcements. But despite that impression, already there were less of them in the sky – and more chitauri warships, dropping in from God-knew-where. The alarming, impassive black ovaloids seemed to climb out of shadows that hadn’t been there before; and the light in both the west and the east diminished as more and more enemy ships screamed forth with raking fire, sending draconic and humanoid corpses hurtling ground-ward.

Nor were the ground troops spared. A trio of chitauri ducked into the building, ahead of pursuit by Yulong’s forces – Steve took them out with a pair of throws, and prepared to go meet the friendlies. They looked to be trying to set up a perimeter about the break in the wall – a perimeter that would be needed, but which they didn’t have time to develop, because he could see more enemy infantry stampeding through the street coming toward them. Steve took a last glance back, to make sure that the wall behind them still stood – and then had to dive that way.

Steve caught Tony’s arm, which he was painfully, slowly reaching towards his past self – caught it, and forced it down, back against his side. Tony made a sound that was half a grunt, half a moan of agony – “Don’t,” said Steve, “I’m sorry, _don’t._ ” Tony fought his grip, but weakly – the thin metal bandages extremis had woven for him cracked and he began bleeding again. He still kept fighting – Steve had to half sit on him to keep him from crawling towards his goal.

Ahead, Yulong’s forces met the oncoming enemy charge, and the battlefield immediately dissolved into a general melee – and then it vanished entirely, as one of the ovaloid ships panned a wide, black beam across it, and every moving thing upon the field turned to dust.

_No. No, Yulong -_

“I am finished,” announced Tripitaka.

There was no time to mourn.

Steve released his hold for only a moment, intending to help Tripitaka, quickly – but Tony lunged forward, with greater strength – greater, but so, so much less. Steve pinned him again – and Anthony surged upright into a sitting position, then stumbled to his feet.

“No, no, no!” he mumbled, pulling at his ears so hard that Steve feared he might do himself real harm. “No – ” he took off at a run for the entrance, just as another beam passed over it, and Steve let go of Tony with one arm to throw his shield for Anthony’s feet, tripping him up and setting him head over heels across the stone. The sorcerer curled up into a ball again and covered his eyes.

“Stay, Steve Rogers,” said Tripitaka. “This is my purpose.” He tugged at Tony – Tony-that-was, and Steve wished he could see him, just once, face-to-face – he didn’t even _know_ that Tony, not yet. Not really. He’d never get to know that Tony – even now, it was too late: he’d seen the things within the Void, had a shadow cast upon his soul.

“Thank you,” said Steve, and Tripitaka stepped into the Font, hauling the past in behind him.

“Damn you,” rasped Tony, and he ceased struggling. His breath hitched once, twice, and he turned his face down, away, so that Steve couldn’t see it.

Steve climbed off of him – and, warily, stayed between him and the Font. When would he know if the time loop had stabilized? _Would_ he know? He didn’t even know how the cat, or Tripitaka, or supposedly Kuan-Yin had known in the first place.

It didn’t matter. Either way, they had done what they’d come here to do – maybe they hadn’t succeeded, but they’d done all they could. Now –

There was a great moment of silence, a moment of mourning, and the sun in the east went out.

“ _Nooooo_ oo,” moaned Anthony, crawling upon hands and knees toward Steve and falling over half-way. _“No_ , no, it’s here, here, s’after it – ”

 

_An Impossibility rears up before Tripitaka and he screams, and keeps screaming. He will scream for the rest of his life. It is alright, he consoles himself. That is not going to be very long. The portal looms before him, the past of the unconscious burden he carries; he waits a moment more, for the portal to close – all his courage burning up along with his soul – and in the instant after it does, he dives through._

_His soul hits reality and it is with relief that he lets go, dispersing on impact; the people of Earth never see him. Tony falls through a bright May sky toward New York._

_No one tells him to remember._

 

Worlds turn over. Time slips. They iterate, again and again, and now it is the same each time:

 

_“I know you’re not real,” Tony tells Steve, who is standing – as always – just outside the edge of his vision. “When you’re real, you’re a lot nicer to me.”_

_“I’m trying to save your life,” Steve says, with such sincerity that Tony almost believes him this time. It’s the same look of sincerity that Real Steve wears when he’s found something in his history books that make him very happy or very angry. For a moment, Tony wonders, and then Steve adds, “They’re going to kill you and slice up your corpse. I’m trying to save your life, Tony. You can’t trust them.”_

_“Yeah, that line’s way more convincing when it’s Clint and Natasha, and oh, god, I’m talking to my hallucinations,” Tony mutters. He needs to take a break. He needs to see_ actual _Steve, because he can stand seeing the others and hearing their voices, but not with Steve, not when Steve spends so much time with him – the only flesh-and-blood person Tony really sees anymore, and if he can’t keep the two of them straight then he’s going to go crazy. Crazier._

_“I’m going to skin you alive and wear your face as a mask,” says Steve. He sounds sad about it, the sort of sad that inspires people to make large donations to charities for orphans._

_“Oh, fuck off,” Tony suggests, and he turns away from the screen._

_When he returns, he’s had another idea in the meantime, and he never gets to finish the patch he was writing for extremis’ system hardware repair._

_“Steve,” Tony’s image tells him, and Steve feels half-guilty, almost wishing his message_ hadn’t _survived –_ why _had it survived, when Pepper’s hadn’t? The image licked its lips, and kicked at the ground. “I owe you an apology. I’ve been unfair to you.”_

No, _Steve thinks, and_ Why did you do it, then?

 _“You’ll understand when you read the files,” the image says, eyes dark and expression opaque. But there aren’t any files left – Tony destroyed them all. “And you’ll probably think – but you’ll be wrong. No matter what came before – so I was an idiot, I needed a kick to see what – look, what I’m trying to say is. I_ am _your friend. Well,_ was _, if you’re seeing this. But that’s not the point – the point is, I look at you and I see_ you _. Please don’t doubt that.”_

What the Hell is that supposed to mean? _Steve wonders._

_Tony wakes up, and shit, this is not his day, because if that’s a mirror he looks like ten miles of bad road and what the hell is he wearing?_

_“What the hell did you do to your soul?” his reflection asks him._

_Not his reflection. That’s an improvement. “What the hell are you_ wearing? _” Tony demands._

_“ULTRON, you idiot, this won’t kill me!” Tony yells, but nothing happens – nothing discernible. ULTRON doesn’t know – of course ULTRON doesn’t know, they’d never discussed the immortality curse in his presence, not when he was online – Tony hadn’t wanted to discuss it at all. Or had there been more to it than that? Some instinctive realization that this has always been the way it’s going to end, or some hidden prejudice?_

_“Steve – oh, god – ” this is his fault. He’s fucked up so badly. He’s fucked up, and if he ever had a way out then it’s useless now, because he can’t fucking_ _remember._ _Fucking human memory – he’s going to make a goddamn EMP-proof camera and take it everywhere he goes from now on, record and replay –_

_Something wakes up in his brain, like that was a coded phrase. Wakes up, and he can not-see-but-it’s-there alien symbols, and somehow, he knows it’s code. Programming. There is something in his head._

_There’s something in his head, and it’s indexing his memories, putting them back in order._

_There’s something in his head, and he doesn’t have write-access._

_The zombie spits against the ground, acid-green spit that makes the mud bubble, and growls with two distinct voices, “You defy us? We will consume you.”_

_“Mister, better than you have tried,” Steve snaps back, but his heart isn’t in it._

_At the end of the day, this guy isn’t his enemy. He’s just another victim._

_The zombie rushes forward._

_The first time Steve had gone up against a super-zombie, he’d gotten his ass handed to him; but then he’d been weak from hunger and the residual effects of fighting off extremis. He’s killed several since. They’re ridiculously fast, and hard to hit – the ROCAF has had some luck with conventional weaponry, but too often the zombies can avoid it with an almost preternatural sense of where not to be. But in a close fight – they’re vulnerable. When they commit, they’re tied down – and then it’s just a question of hitting them hard enough._

_By the time Rhodey shows up, it’s over._

_“You went AWOL,” Steve says, and he’s angry. Angry at Rhodey, angry at_ Tony _– he misses his team, badly._

 _“Nah, I asked permission, Haymitch said she could spare me for twenty,” Rhodey says. Steve can_ hear _him rolling his eyes. “Jesus, man. You could have waited ten minutes.”_

_Steve wishes Rhodey would stop trying to wrap him in cotton wool – they’ve all been trying, since he was ‘gone’, and it’s getting damn tiresome. “He was heading for a city.” So far, they’ve been lucky to keep the zombie outbreak mostly isolated to within south China, holding the borders of Myanmar and Thailand while the Chinese have kept a lid on the north and the east. There’s no reliable way to keep the superzombies behind quarantine, though: they have to be constantly on guard, ready to track down those that break through. Track down, and put down._

_Steve might be tired, but he can’t be spared._

_Steve cuts Tony off. “Look, I don’t like him and I know you hate him for a damn good reason. But it seems like he got a crash course in this. If you go around programming your past self to do things, it won’t work. You can’t take knowledge back – you can only transfer matter.”_

_“He_ tell you that _?” Tony demands._

_“Yes.” Steve grimaces. “I don’t like it either, Tony.”_

_Tony leans back on one knee, staring first at Steve with the Iron Man’s expressionless mask, then at Tripitaka. “You think he knows what he’s talking about? Steve, look, it’s dominoes. I won’t change_ big _things, I won’t blow up the damn Font – but one tiny change at a time, until we reach a point where everything inside this loop is not so goddamned fucked._ Then _, I can repeat it, make it stable.”_

 _“What is that point, Tony?” Steve asks softly, insistently. “Tell me when_ good enough _is going to be. Explain the stakes, here.”_

_“Earth,” Tony says. “At the very least, ten million lives.”_

_“They’re already dead, Tony.”_

_“I can’t let you do this.”_

_Tony looks up sharply._ “You can’t _let me_ do this?”

_“Thank you,” says Steve, and Tripitaka steps into the Font, hauling the past in behind him._

“Nooooooo,” _moans Anthony, crawling upon hands and knees toward Steve and falling over half-way. “No, no, it’s here, here, s’after it – ”_

 

 

“Tony?” Steve asked him warily. He might be unhinged – he was still capable of throwing lightning about. If his wards –

“Death’s would-be Lover, eternally scorned,” babbled Anthony, “a thing – not a thing – how does an un-thing court a thing? A universal constant, no less – gate – the _gate_ , the loop, oh, no – ”

Steve could feel it, a presence stealing over his skin – war and murder, greed and blood. He looked about, and then more wildly – _someone_ was here, he knew that much, but –

“A break, a crack, a fault,” said Anthony, staggering to his feet again. He tottered toward Steve, swaying and nearly falling – Steve held out an arm to steady him but Anthony continued straight toward the Font, brushing him off. “I’m sorry – your shield, I saw it, I _saw_ it, I can – ” he held up his hands like he was praying, and Steve – fell.

There was no ground.

There was no air.

There was no _Steve_.

“Makes sense,” murmured Anthony. There was no Anthony. “A fault – a crack – copies without limit, or rather, limited infinity – not allowed. Not for you!” he screamed up at the thing that _was_ there, within the unreality that Anthony had thrown at Steve, when he had been Steve, when he had _existed_ – Anthony laughed, and laughed. “Crack open, then, and _break!_ ”

And he stepped into the Font.

 

 

_“God of Lies, where be thou found?” Tony Stark, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth, asks of the universe – and then looks up in time to see himself – no alternate, this – fall out of the sky, turning upon him with a spell that burrows past his every defence – of course it does. After all, he’s the one who designed them._

_He barely has time to wonder why before he dies._

 

A crack forms across the face of the Font. It is a construct greater than any single paradox, but it is already under stress. The loop formed by the previous iteration may be stable, but to get there took too much energy: and now this new instability drives the energies higher still. More fractures spread away from the first as Time repeats, _changes_ \- 

 

“Never figured Captain America for a coward,” _says Tony, and he turns back to the Font. Steve stares at him – five steps from it, then four – each one a missed chance and if he doesn’t decide, the decision is going to be taken from him. It’s unthinkable, and it’s his one damn chance –_

_He can’t do it._

_Tony steps back into the Font, and stability –_

_\- flies –_

_\- apart –_

 

The fractures bleed orange light, each mote flaring for only a moment before dispersing back into the Unreality beneath it. The cycle iterates, slipping out of control, unbounded, reality overwritten with energy from nothing. Five thousand ways they journeyed from Manhattan to this moment, ten thousand, ten million – it is impossible to say how many; at the start of each new cycle, the previous one is overwritten, so that each might as well be the first. 

And always, at the end, someone goes back – or sends something back. Sometimes, something is sent back further. Always, things change, and yet they still end up here – because to prevent the collapse of their multiverse, someone _must._

 

_“You can’t kill me like this! You think I haven’t tested this?” Tony screams at ULTRON._

_“You are a threat,” ULTRON says flatly. “Bringing you here was a mistake.”_

_And Steve isn’t there to stop him, later –_

_A butterfly flaps its wings in China._

 

_“You are unworthy of my secrets,” declares a rebel child of Maklu._

_“A dragon named Fin Fang Foom slaughtered its way across half of Asia. You owe us were-gild,” Steve says stubbornly. The judge isn’t listening to him – he wishes he had any of his team here beside him. Natasha –_ Tony...

A hundred iterations and none are the same: they swing wider and wider apart. With every piece of information dragged out from prior cycles - cycles that no longer exist, information that exists only by paradox - the stress upon the Font grows. The paradoxes are too much for a stable time-line: it must keep changing, or collapse. Until this point someone has always made it back - made it to the Font, gone back, changed _something_. The loop continues. But with each change, the probability of failure grows, and the cracks across the Font spread. 

_“Then listen well,”_ _purrs a dragon. Maya makes notes until her fingers cramp, and then keeps writing._

_“Sir, we have a hit in Alaska – ”_

_“What the hell happened to the border guard? Damn it – Rogers, I want you on this. And somebody get me Dr. Banner.”_

_“I can make him forget,” says Anthony._

_He does and he leaves and never returns._

_“Before you inevitably try to kill me, you should probably know I’m immortal,” Tony tells ULTRON._

_“Before you try to kill me and Steve, you should probably know that I wrote another layer into that virus,” Tony tells ULTRON._

_“If you do try to kill me, don’t let me see it coming,” Tony tells ULTRON. “I don’t want to know.”_

_“Jesus – I’m sorry. I... Jesus. I don’t blame you for killing him,” Tony tells ULTRON, and loathes himself a little more._

_A butterfly flaps its wings in Ohio._

_Paranoia, and Tony doesn’t tell ULTRON anything._

_“ULTRON, you idiot, this won’t kill me!” Tony yells, but nothing happens – nothing discernible. ULTRON doesn’t know – of course ULTRON doesn’t know, they’d never discussed the immortality curse in his presence, not when he was online – Tony hadn’t wanted to discuss it at all. Or had there been more to it than that? Some instinctive realization that this has always been the way it’s going to end, or some hidden prejudice?_

_“Your technology is more advanced than ours,” Steve tells his older counterpart. “I get that whatever’s going on with the gods,” he doesn’t quite trip over it this time, “is probably more important. But if you can spare us scientists – that could save a lot of lives.”_

_“Turn back, mortals,” the soldiers warn them._

_“I can’t let you do this.”_

_Tony looks up sharply._ “You can’t _let me_ do this?”

Something critical within the Font snaps beneath the strain. The collapse distorts the loop, sending shockwaves even further backwards and forward through Time -

_“It is a gap in the universe. We call it the Window of Time. We do not look upon it, for obvious reasons – but it seems Thanos greatly desires to try.”_

_“You want me to defend it.”_

_“If it is accessed, the results could be catastrophic. We have placed many defences upon it, but at the last... if they fall, you are perhaps the only living being who might be able to withstand_ it _.”_

_“They won’t send me back to Earth, Tony. I might as well come with you.”_

_“If you see it – ”_

_“Then we won’t let the enemy get it open.”_

The distortion spins out cracks like spiderwebs.

_Tony knows he’s becoming paranoid. Every time he looks at Steve, sitting on the couch in his workshop, he has to wait and check – is he real? Or is he going to warn Tony that everyone’s about to kill him?_

_Which_ is _real?_

_“Oh my god... a_ window... _”_

_“What?”_

_“Steve – it’s not just a window – it can be opened. The latch is on the inside...”_

_“Tony, you’re not making any sense.”_

_“It’s a loop. It’s a_ time-loop _. It’s not just a window – ” his hand passes through the black stone easily, and it doesn’t come out the other side; if he wriggles his fingers, he can feel the Nothingness. “This is it. This is what I’ve been looking for – ”_

_He steps forward._

_“Tony!”_

_“You can’t destabilize a time loop. It’s impossible,” says Tripitaka. “The Window doesn’t work that way – it can’t pull energy back through into reality. It shows the framework but cannot change it.”_

_“You can shut the hell up,” says Tony._

_“Look, I don’t like him and I know you’ve got damn good reasons for hating him, but – ”_

_“Steve, I’ve done this before, okay? I_ know _him. I couldn’t remember before because I blocked it from myself, because we needed him to get this far, but – I remember now. I’ve already done this, sent nanites into the past with instructions for myself – he’s wrong. We can change this. I know how, now. Before, I got it wrong, but_ this _time – it’s a done deal.”_

The light is fading, spread too thin into the nothingness of Unreality.

_“Come on, Steve, if you really believed that – you’d stop me.” He looks back at Steve. “Or... no. Wow. It hasn’t even occurred to you, has it?” Jesus. Even bound and on his knees, staring back at him with shock and fury – Steve is_ wrong _, he has to be, but Tony’s heart warms at the privilege of being this man’s friend._

_“I will not stain my soul again. I will not be a coward,” Tripitaka says calmly. “I will not commit Evil to avoid Evil.”_

_Tony steps through._

 

_Tripitaka is lying on the floor, insensate from Tony's earlier punch. At the time Steve had thought it well-deserved, but now Tony steps forward and – five steps from it, then four – each one a missed chance and if Steve doesn't decide, the decision is going to be taken from him. It's unthinkable, and it's his one damn chance –_

_He can’t do it._

_Tony steps through._

_“To choose between two evils is still to choose evil,” Tripitaka says contemplatively. Old, sour hatred twists Tony’s mouth in a grimace – so he’s still human enough to have that reaction. Should have figured that Tripitaka would still be human – well, humanoid-alien – enough to remain an annoying fuck-wit, too. “But to not choose is, in itself, a choice. The Holy Bodhisattva teaches that we must always seek the choice that is good, or at least that is not evil. I must try – ”_

_Tony rolls his eyes and turns back to the Window, ignoring him. Tripitaka can philosophize all he likes, but Tony doesn’t have to listen. He steps through._

 

Fading...

 

_Tony’s standing in Steve’s kitchen like he’s not just turned his entire world upside-down._

_“You’re a time-traveller,” Steve says slowly._

_“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before.” Tony looks down, laughs a bit. “I was kinda afraid I’d break something.”_

If the idea of 'cutting things close' were applicable, that would be what he's doing. But it isn't. The Font-Window-Tear is one over-stressed thread from total collapse, but it will not collapse without this action; it is as impossible as the idea that he would not act. 

The break he makes is deliberate, the iteration carefully chosen. A reflected wave is coming back at him from the other side of time; this new shockwave is coordinated to have an extremely exact effect at two precise points in time – one of them now. One of them long ago. In between changes merely to match – but not too much. Civilizations can rise and fall along the crest of a wave in Time... or change just a little. 

The light fades and is gone, taking with it another, more metaphorical kind of light. 

He's done here. He goes. The universe remains a little bit darker – and exactly as dark as it always was. The change from that past point travels forward to now, and – 

 

_“The harmonious law of this kingdom must not be broken; I am sorry for your people's loss, but my ruling must favour the lesser evil.”_

 

_“You think us barbarians, scum of the earth,” says an old lady seated at the end of the table. There was a vast number of wrinkles lining her skin – Tony’s memory recorder tried to store the image and nearly got caught in a fractal error – and her spine was curving deeply, yet she gave the impression of sitting up very, very straight: unbowed, unbent, and unbroken. “What should we do? If the village gives up no children, then our crops all wither, locusts devour our stores, and all our cured meat rots, so that many more children than just two die. So we sacrifice two each year, and weep over it, so that their age-mates may live to see maturity.”_

 

_“But is this the right action to take?” Tripitaka asks. “If we fail here we risk causing many more deaths. Two would be the lesser evil. These people are not wrong in following the teachings of Heaven.”_

_If he ever sees the Chief Magistrate again, Steve decides, he is going to have_ words _with her. He'd thought... he'd thought better of her. Maybe it's just the people of this kingdom distorting what Maklu truly believes, but whether the Makluans set themselves up as gods or were set up by others, they have a responsibility for what people believe in their name._

 

_“The Lesser Evil,” says Tripitaka contemplatively. “Is it to act now, or do nothing? Both are decisions. Oh, my Lady, I am sorry – you taught me that indecision is an evil all its own, but I am too stupid to see the right path forward.”_

_Tony rolls his eyes and turns back to the Font, ignoring him. Tripitaka can philosophize all he –_

_Pain consumes his world._

 

_Steve tries to go to help Yulong’s defenders, but Tony’s hand is reaching for his past self – trembling, shaking from the after-effects – and Steve dives towards him barely in time to prevent him from making contact, grabbing his hand and forcing it down –_

_“Stay, Steve Rogers,” says Tripitaka. “This is my purpose and my penance.”_

_Steve can’t thank him for it._

 

_An Impossibility rears up before Tripitaka and he screams, and keeps screaming. He will scream for the rest of his life. It is alright, he consoles himself. That is not going to be very long. The portal looms before him, the past of the unconscious burden he carries; he waits a moment more, for the portal to close – all his courage burning up along with his soul – and in the instant after it does, he dives through._

_Tripitaka's soul hits reality and it is with relief that he lets go, dispersing on impact; the people of Earth never see him. Tony falls through a bright May sky toward New York._

_No one tells him to remember, or to forget. No one tells him of dragons or a foreboding obsidian slab. No one tells him of the things inside his head, mindlessly watching through his eyes. The only voices he hears are of his own insanity._

 

Worlds turn over. Time slips. They iterate, again and again, and now it is the same each time...

 

 

 

“Damn you,” rasped Tony, and he ceased struggling. His breath hitched once, twice, and he turned his face down, away, so that Steve couldn’t see it.

Steve climbed off of him – and, warily, stayed between him and the Window. It was still there – if Tony made to go for it, he _still_ might try to change things, and this time... Tripitaka wouldn’t be there to make the decision for him. Steve couldn’t face that choice again – would rather have done _anything_ than face it again. They needed to leave. They’d come here to defend the Window – but Tony was now its greatest immediate threat. They needed to leave.

There was a great moment of silence, a moment of mourning, and the sun in the east went out.

Steve could feel the thing that stole its light, a presence crawling over his skin – war and murder, greed and blood. He looked about, and then more wildly – _someone_ was here, he knew that much, but – a crack appeared across the black face of the Window, a dry snapping sound like a broken limb, and Steve froze. So did the presence.

A whisper of wind curled across his cheek, and the Window shattered into a hundred thousand pieces.


	11. The Last Act

Before the first shards had hit the ground, the presence made its rage felt: a directionless force buffeted Steve, denying his lungs the power to draw breath. Steve tried, and with great effort, managed to bring his hands up to clap over his ears; but this was a futile effort: none of the pressure was really sound. He could feel it resonate within his bones, but it was silent, as was the battlefield – both outside the building and above it.

The first broken pieces hit the stone floor and bounced, breaking further, then further, into dust. It became a cloud that spiralled upward, borne on the fury of a god denied – a god beyond all other gods; this wasn’t anything he could worship, but Steve knew it was more than Loki or Hercules or Amora. The cloud ate away the roof and spiralled further to the skies, and Steve was helpless to do anything but watch – the unending pressure would not let him turn his head away. A stray enemy ship that got in the way of the cloud was obliterated and added to it.

Something else was spiralling down from the sky to meet it, originating from a point so far off that Steve couldn’t tell where it began. It might have been the being that was the source of the presence; or perhaps it was something else. Steve didn’t know.

A long, brown-and-green dragon curled itself about the broken remains of the building and stuck its head in, carefully avoiding the power flowing up from the centre; Steve watched it from the edge of his vision, unable to turn and look. Then, as though it were withdrawing into itself, the dragon’s tail began to shorten – the coil retreated rapidly until it was very near the head, and then that shrunk, too, as the tail’s end split and a woman walked forward on two legs. Then Steve _could_ look, and did – and found himself staring, heart aching and furious.

“That’s very rude, ma’am,” he told the whatever-it-was. Another demon? Or maybe just a dragon with demonic powers.

“ _You,”_ hissed Tony. Steve glanced at him – he had pulled himself over onto his side, shaking from the effort of it, and was glaring at the woman with a look of utter hatred.

“I’m sorry, Steve,” she apologized. He could have forgiven her pretty much anything, with that face – except the act of wearing it. Sarah Rogers had been her own woman, and there was not one damn person in the world – this or any other – who had the right to pretend otherwise. “I appear as you expect. Many find it unsettling.”

“It’s disrespectful,” Steve said tightly. He tightened his grip on his shield.

“It’s tribute,” she corrected gently, and Steve – grimaced. Would his mother have agreed? It was hard to try to even think about, with an alien in front of him wearing her face. “I am Kuan-Yin. I’ve come to send you home.”

Steve looked around, deliberately – there weren’t any more ground troops within sight – damn it, _Yulong_ – but there were still plenty of ships overhead. Yet they, too, were being rapidly destroyed by the ever-widening dust-storm of two meeting powers – a sight he could look at now and not be compelled by; it felt like he was watching it through a three-foot thick wall of military-grade glass. Kuan-Yin was protecting him, he realized with another start of anger.

“Now?” he demanded. _“Now_ you can send us home? What about your war?” Had she known what Tony would try to do when she’d asked him to guard the Window, and kept Steve back to stop him? A fine hash he’d made of that – but she’d also sent Tripitaka, hadn’t she? She’d played them all like puppets.

“The war is over,” said Kuan-Yin, casting her gaze to the sky. Her words rung with finality. “It is not an end any of us had foreseen, but it is perhaps a better end than any of us could have hoped for.”

“What is that?” Steve nodded to the sky.

“The Living Tribunal has stepped forth and pitted its might against Thanos,” said Kuan-Yin gravely. “Such a manifestation is not a thing that this realm shall long withstand; but when it defeats Thanos here, that shall be the Mad Titan’s end. This multiverse shall live on, wounded though it may be by the loss of its heart.” She smiled at him, warm and understanding – he half-expected her to say, _Stevie..._ “You should go home, Steve. Your world is waiting for you to bring its cure.”

“First things first,” Tony spoke up. He pushed himself up into a sitting position – painfully slowly, but when Steve would have moved forward to help him, Tony flinched back violently. Steve got the message. “Your damned collar. You said you could take it off in person.”

Steve could count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of times he had seen his mother wear that cold look, icy pity and disdain all bundled up with rage and barely restrained. She hadn’t liked to let him see her so angry, although her wrath had never been directed at an undeserving target. “A child learns by example; an adult by pain; and how do the soulless learn? I see that they don’t.”

“Oh, bite me,” hissed Tony.

Her gaze was full of knives. “I told you I knew you were no copy. Do you wish to know how I knew? A construct is _designed_ without a soul; they are not _meant_ to have them. Mortal sages might look at you and see only its lack, but I can see where it’s been ripped from you – a gaping wound, emptier than the Void. Your emptiness will consume you, and anything you’re allowed to touch. I’d thought, hoped, to err on the side of mercy – but you’d have thrown the entire multiverse away for fewer lives than would fit in a grain of sand. Anything to assuage your guilt.” She shook her head. “The soulless do not learn. You need a leash.”

No. Not like this. Steve raised his chin – then lowered it again. “Not like that.”

“This is the lesser evil,” said Kuan-Yin, shooting him a dismissive look, and there was something broken, something dirty about hearing those words from her. God knew he’d heard it from Tripitaka, and the Great Sage Soen, and every priest they’d met on this journey, but from her it sounded damningly wrong.

She took a small blue marble from a pocket of her nursing uniform – a child’s toy. It might have been either blue or green. The light was beginning to die; the duststorm above had encompassed the whole of the sky as far as Steve could see. It hadn’t yet spread down toward the buildings, but it would – he could feel it, approaching. A storm that wasn’t a storm, but two powers greater than a mortal mind was meant to observe.

“Please,” said Tony. His voice was utterly without inflection.

Kuan-Yin tossed the marble between them, and in a blink of an eye it grew into an entire world, blue and green and – dark, and Steve staggered and nearly stumbled, completely unable to see. His eyes adjusted a moment later: Tony’s arc reactor was the only source of light. The other nodes upon his armour were no longer glowing, melted as they had been when he’d – broken.

But it wasn’t like the end of the world had been; it wasn’t dead silent – there was a quiet humming all around them, ventilation and running electronics, whirring motors and fans. The air wasn’t freezing, either, just slightly chill. Large, sleek mechanical shapes loomed out of the darkness, and a few seconds after he turned his back on Tony entirely and gave his vision a chance to adjust again, he could make out the rest of their surroundings.

They were in the mine in Ohio. Tony’s equipment was still on, but of course – there were no lights.

“We’re back,” said Steve. He turned back to Tony. “Are you – is there anything – ” he changed his first question – the answer was obvious – but the second was no better, and so he cut himself off.

“Anything?” Tony asked, and chuckled humourlessly. It quickly turned into a racking cough, and he doubled over until he spat something dark out on the floor – blood, perhaps. “Anything? No.”

Steve looked down, cheeks heating in shame. What Tony had wanted to do – even not knowing the full risks, it had been wrong. _Tony_ had been wrong. The Window had broken almost immediately after Tripitaka had gone through, and Tripitaka had been actively trying to not damage it; how much worse would it have been if Tony hadn’t been prevented from attempting to change things? But if Steve had done the right thing in not stopping Tripitaka – not that he could have –

\- _don’t be a liar, Rogers, you didn’t even try_ –

He was so tired of hearing about the lesser evil. 

“We need to get up to the surface as soon as – you can,” Steve said. He had to clear his throat to ease the roughness, before continuing, “And the cure – we need to get that out as soon as possible. To... whoever possible.”

It had been weeks. Maybe more, considering how they’d gotten bounced about in time as Maklu had fractured around them. Extremis might have spread a lot faster in that time, however long it had been. Somehow, the knowledge that the truth was just an elevator ride away made the uncertainty harder to bear than it had been in all the long weeks leading up to this point.

“Right,” said Tony sarcastically. “Save the poor shmucks still standing. And then I’m off to jail, I guess.” There was still an edge of pain in his voice. He hid it well, but they’d been through too much together, by now, for Steve not to recognize it.

Steve’s stomach twisted. It didn’t mean that he could just let Tony walk away, though. He wasn’t responsible for extremis getting loose – not entirely – but that didn’t take away his culpability for the virus itself. Even disregarding that, he’d smuggled murderers from prison, and then planted three of them with murder chips that had killed them.  _Yes_ , he’d been in an altered mental state when that had happened – but did Steve have the right to make that call? He wasn’t any sort of doctor.

But. There was always a _but_. “It oughtta be left to the judiciary,” Steve admitted. “But there’s no way you’d get a fair trial.” There wasn’t a person alive who didn’t know all about the nanoplague, and have a strong opinion about it, too. Hell, unless Tony was extradited – and Fury would never let that happen – the worst things he’d done were all outside of American jurisdiction. And since he wouldn’t be extradited, it would get left up to the doctors. Or, rather, Fury... and the politicians.

He definitely couldn’t just be left on his own. Not with what he’d just tried to do – and not with what had just been done to him.

“Trial? Please. Like that’d happen. Go on, tell ‘em everything you know about me,” Tony said, taunting. “Tell them I have eyes in every traffic camera in New York – oh, and I got the security systems and _every_ satellite and everything else, too. Tell _Fury_ that. You think they’d risk a trial? You’re delusional.”

“What would you have me do?” Steve asked him. “Let you go? Scot-free? There are at least six million people dead – ”

“I could have saved them,” Tony snarled.

“Or killed them all,” said Steve, because this was the point: that even if Tony wasn’t mentally culpable for what he’d done under the influence of a thrice-damned _stain on his soul_ , he sure as Hell wasn’t showing any signs of changing his behaviour. “You’re not God, Tony, you have to stop trying to play at it!”

“God? Damn right I’m not – because I actually try to fucking _do_ something!” Tony lurched to his feet, supporting himself off of a nearby piece of machinery. “You think leaving it as it is will _fix_ anything? You’re a goddamned _moron_ – ”

“I’d thought you’d have learned by now that _doing_ something isn’t always the answer, not when it’s the wrongthing to do,” Steve sniped back.

“Sure! Why not just sit on your ass and pray to God! And hey, if it’s the fate of the multiverse, maybe someone else _will_ intervene,” Tony threw up his hands. “But guess what, Steve, nothing less is ever gonna be worthy of that sort of attention – look at how long it waited to interfere _this time_ ,” he threw Steve’s words back at him. “One little world, twenty million measly little lives? There’s no god out there who gives a shit! There’s no great benevolent power, there’s just a bunch of power-mad _aliens_ out to fuck us over if they think it’ll get them ahead. So yeah, I tried and I screwed up, but I can’t just fuck off and do diddly-squat while everybody else dies – _again!_ You didn’t even have the balls to stop me yourself, you just stood aside and _let_ them all die!”

He finished his rant and stood glaring at Steve, half-panting for breath as Steve stood, shocked motionless. It wasn’t Tony’s snarls or shouting that had given Steve pause – it wasn’t even his words, as cruel as they were (were they true?). But the sight of Tony openly weeping, tears tracing their way down his cheeks even as he shouted, was enough to hold Steve still.

“Maybe they’re aliens playing at gods. And maybe none of ‘em are as good as we’d like ‘em to be,” Steve said, when it was clear that Tony had run out of steam. Too much of what he’d said was damn true – if, in part, because Tony had had some truly shit luck in meeting gods. But the latter part... Steve had stood aside and let Tripitaka make that choice. Steve could try and ignore it all he liked, but there it was.  

“It doesn’t mean we should lower ourselves to that level, of thinking we’re above it all, that we have all the answers – that we can step in and change things for _everyone_ ,” Steve finished.

“Act or don’t act,” Tony said sharply. At least he was no longer yelling – he wiped a hand across his face, grimaced, and wiped again. “Both are choices. If it’s not me acting, it’ll sure as hell be somebody else – and gods don’t give a damn about humans.” His voice grew steadily flatter as he spoke.

“‘Somebody else’ hasn’t caused mass deaths, so you’ll excuse me if I find it hard to buy your theory,” Steve said flatly. “It was your own mistake you were trying to fix and you screwed up trying to fix it, Tony. The Window broke. Don’t try to wriggle out of that.”

Tony closed his eyes. He looked exhausted – exhausted and in pain, swaying on his feet, his lips pressed tight and pale together, bloodless. “I could have saved them,” he said again, low and shuddering. It wasn’t denial. It was just grief.

“No,” said Steve simply – but he knew from the look that Tony shot him that this was something on which they were never, ever going to agree.

_Damn it._

The silence between them clung, thick and heavy; Steve let Tony collect himself. “Alright,” said Tony, breaking the silence just as it ran past the awkward point. “It’s done.” He scrubbed at his face again, then turned to scraping one nail under the edge of the thin, golden second skin that was all the armour he was wearing – it ended at his palms and the backs of his hands – like he was trying to peel it off.

“What’s done?” Steve asked, because he knew Tony wasn’t referring to the topic of their discussion. He gave Tony another once-over: Tony’s hands were no longer shaking, nor the rest of him, but there was something listless in the way he picked at the remnants of the armour clinging to his skin. The bulk of his armour lay in a heap at his feet, half of it melted and half of it still looking like plate. At least the wound on his shoulder was healed over. Everything else... what Tripitaka had done to stop him hadn’t resulted in a physical wound.

“Extremis. Zombies. I’ve got a hardwire to the surface from here – I grabbed a couple of satellites as soon as we got back. I just got the pingback confirmation that a link was secured to the hive. It’s a defensive disadvantage of a hive-mind – stronger than the individual, but grab one and you’ve got them all. The new code I wrote for it’ll reach saturation in a couple hours.”

Done. Just like that. Steve blinked in disbelief. Not that he wasn’t overjoyed, but – it seemed too much. And it was tempered by the still unknown variable.

The answer to _that_ question wasn’t unknown to Tony, though, not if he had access to satellites from down here. Steve cleared his throat – and then again. He was suddenly, painfully aware that he still hadn’t had anything to eat, or much to drink, since – God knew how long. If another crisis kicked up, the adrenaline and serum might keep him going, but otherwise he was going to become useless very shortly.

“How many?” he asked, and then, before Tony could answer – because he wasn’t sure which answer he wanted more, “How long were we gone?”

Tony paused, his eyes flicking up and catching Steve’s. “About eight milliseconds.”

Steve gaped at him – and then caught himself and shut his jaw. Eight thousandths of a second – no wonder Tony’s machinery was still running. Eight _thousandths_ – no time at all. Weeks of delay, and he’d resigned himself to the mounting costs, but this –

The nanoplague was over – would shortly be over, anyway. China could rebuild. Bruce could start sleeping through the night again, maybe. Natasha could come back from France. Rhodey could stop spending week-long stints in the War Machine suit. He could finally take the time to rebuild his team properly. Pepper –

God, such selfish reliefs. But it was _over_.

“Have you called SHIELD?” he asked, when he could think straight enough to speak. He felt light-headed – he needed something to eat. And water. And some sleep. The adrenaline was fading hard – and Tony, still wearing nothing but the sheerest metal coating, he wasn’t doing any better. Lord, they were a matched pair.

“If I say I haven’t?” Tony asked quietly. He tilted his head to the side and forward, just enough so that light bounced off of the thin headband that he still wore. “Your war’s over, Steve. Mine is still out there. And I’m not going to stop fighting it.”

“I’m starting to wonder if you didn’t program it into you,” Steve said. He tugged off a glove and pressed a finger into the sharp edge of his shield, letting the brief pain wake some of the adrenaline back up – enough to see them both upstairs, maybe.

“Nah, this is me, born and bred,” said Tony, his tone a horrible parody of carelessness. “Didn’t you hear Kuan-Yin? Not a clone. Just obsessed, unable to learn, and fated to die horribly.”

Steve had known people who could fit those terms – people who probably had a soul, even if it was as black as Hell. Tony wasn’t one of those people. Kuan-Yin was wrong about that. Still, he hoped that she was at least right about Tony being the original – so that there wasn’t another of him out there, terribly injured and constantly dying...

Well, in all the realities of the multi-verse there likely was, but it wasn’t one Steve had ever met... hopefully. He’d thought, somehow, being in Maklu again, that Anthony might show up – he’d parted on good terms with the Magistrate, after all, and they’d found out what the war was about. That he _hadn’t_ was probably the more _likely_ outcome – the multiverse was vast – but Steve still wished he would drop by sometime and explain what the Hell had happened to him, why he’d never come back.

“I’m glad,” said Steve. He was so _tired_. “That you’re you.”

“But you won’t – ”

“Can we not?” Steve asked plaintively. “Just – don’t. Let’s go upstairs, and call SHIELD, and – can we please _try_ to work this out without you running off and playing god and making choices for the whole of Earth. Just give me a _chance_ to try to sort this out.” He spread his hands in supplication. “If you – don’t you want to prove her wrong?”

“And if I say no?” Tony shifted his head again, minutely – just enough to make the light reflecting off of the headband catch Steve’s eye, and he knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard.

If he said yes –

If he said _no_ –

“Just call SHIELD,” Steve said, and he turned away to stumble through the dark toward the elevator, occasionally tripping over the machinery and wires littering the floor. There wasn’t a button, just a lever, and he had to fumble around to find it, his mind feeling slow and dull. As if to double-down on the point, his stomach growled. He didn’t flip the lever, though.

Out on the floor, far away, he heard Tony breathe in, hold his breath for a full five seconds, and then let it out in an explosive sigh. “Okay,” he murmured, and Steve could hear him gathering up bits of the extremis armour. “Okay.”

 

 

 

SHIELD descended upon them in much the same totality with which the massed armies of Thanos had descended upon Maklu. Two minutes after they’d walked out onto the hillside road, Steve was squinting up at spotlights shining down on them from no less than three quinjets – and Steve had no doubt that other reinforcements were either hovering just out of sight, or quickly inbound. Lines dropped down around in a perimeter and black-clad commandos rappelled quickly down them, weapons up and on them in an instant.

“Stand down,” Steve ordered, pulling his cowl off so they could all clearly see his face. “He’s with me.”

“And surrendering,” said Tony, raising his hands. His air of nonchalance might have been more convincing if he hadn’t had to lace his fingers together behind his head to stop his hands from shaking. “Willingly. Seriously, did Fury not mention that part?”

“Sir,” one of the commandos nodded to Steve. “No offence, but we have orders.” She waved two others forward, and they started giving Tony a very thorough pat-down. Steve fought down the urge to roll his eyes. Tony had managed to get the armour malleable again in the elevator, and was now wearing what looked like one too many layers of bulky clothing. A pat-down was useless unless they just stripped him naked, and then that was _still_ probably mostly useless – Tony had even managed to hide the headband, and Steve didn’t think it was just by using the ICG.

“We got a hit, ma’am,” said a commando at the outer part of the circle nearest to the mine – one not actively carrying a gun, but rather a tablet. He was talking to his radio, but the quinjets’ engines weren’t loud enough to make it impossible for Steve to hear. “I _think._ There’s definitely _some_ sort of cloaking tech around here, but it’s not responding to disruptors.”

“It’s right where it looks like it should be,” Tony said helpfully, ignoring the way it ratcheted up the tension. “It’ll be visible in a second.”

And it was, the fenced-over, abandoned mine entrance suddenly replaced with a tunnel wide enough to drive a semi-truck into. There was no flicker or shimmer of transition as it changed.

“You could have turned it off before they got here,” Steve told Tony in an undertone, exasperation colouring his reaction.

 _“It was queued to go last,”_ Tony said, comm.-only, lips not moving – which was a lot weirder than when he was wearing the armour and had his face hidden. _“Timing the self-destruct for some of the tech down there’s a bit... tricky. Not so much to contain the blast... that’s why I picked this mine, it’s deep enough – you didn’t even feel it, did you? – but to make sure all the essential stuff gets taken care of...”_

Steve shot him a look – he was _not_ about to start talking to himself in front of SHIELD, not if Tony was playing this game – and got a sigh over the comm. in return. _“I think we’ve already seen that it’s best if SHIELD limits itself to one world, don’t you?”_

That wasn’t a fair comparison. It especially wasn’t fair coming from Tony – Tony, who’d made _him_ promise never to breathe a word to Bruce of what his counterpart had been like. But... it still had validity. It would probably be best if _no one_ went reality-hopping unsupervised before they could work out some kind of oversight.

He’d promised the other Natasha that they’d try to send back aid. Simply not exporting more trouble seemed like a poor effort.

“I need to speak with the Director, ma’am,” he told the commando who seemed to be in charge.

“And we’re working on getting you to him,” she shot back, with more bite than SHIELD agents usually showed him. “But the package isn’t going anywhere near the Helicarrier.”

Wise, if they weren’t of a mind to trust Tony – although futile, if it came to that. Steve didn’t think it would, but this did confirm that Tony hadn’t told SHIELD very much at all in his first call. Fury was going to take that news _so_ well. 

“Go with SHIELD, Steve,” Tony said aloud, rolling his eyes as his assigned guards started getting extremely personal with the pat-down. “I’m a big boy, and these are the good guys. More or less. If they try to stab me in the neck, it’ll probably be with a sedative, not a poison.” He looked cocksure, posture all arrogance; Steve could see the exhaustion beneath it. He could feel his own, too. _“You wanted a chance,”_ he continued privately. _“This is it.”_

Well. He had that right. “Ma’am,” Steve nodded to the commando who seemed to be in charge. “I’d like to go to the helicarrier. And I need a notepad – the pen and paper version.”

 

 

 

Clint was waiting for him when his quinjet landed out on the deck, flanked by a pair of SHIELD commandos who hung back at his easy gesture. “Man, you are in _so_ much shit,” Clint crowed as they walked to Fury’s office. The commandos kept up a discrete escort behind them, which was really sort of laughable.

“Don’t start,” Steve told him.

“What, or you won’t water my plants the next time I take off AWOL?”

Steve groaned. He’d put that in half so that they’d _know_ it was him, but – oh, good Lord.

“At least everybody’ll know you’re not crazy, now,” Clint continued brightly. “Once the rumours that Stark’s infected you with nanites and turned you into a zombie-puppet die down, anyway.” They passed a pair of harried-looking technicians as he said this, and got identical incredulous, half-panicked looks.

“Thanks,” said Steve, feeling his expression flatten out.

“No problem-o,” Clint shrugged, and said, very casually, “Sorry for doubting you.”

Steve glanced at him. Clint’s posture and stride was as perfectly relaxed as his voice – except that he wasn’t looking at Steve. Clint was a spy – if he’d wanted to hide that, he could have. He could have looked him dead-on and told him that like it really was nothing. But he hadn’t.

“Thanks,” said Steve, very much sincerely this time, as the door slid open to the conference room. Inside, the Director was waiting, with a very nervous-looking Bruce.

“Steve,” said Bruce, and Fury, “Captain.”

The old urge to correct him – ‘Retired’ – flared for only a moment before dying entirely. He’d asked Tony for a chance to work with SHIELD on this, and he’d need all the credibility he could gather if he wanted to bring Tony in on _anything_.

“Bruce,” and, “Sir,” Steve said, the latter more formally. “I’d like to debrief.”

“Like you did in December, or are you _actually_ going to tell us what’s going on this time, Captain?” Fury set his hands together on the conference cable and leaned forward in his chair.

“There’re still reasons I’d like to not explain everything,” Steve admitted, focusing in keeping his gaze on Fury – a better tactic than focusing on keeping his gaze _off_ of Bruce. “But I think I can fill in a lot of the gaps now.”

“Tony Stark, back from the dead,” said Fury. “That man has more lives than a cat.”

“You believed me before,” Steve pointed out. Bruce and Clint both dropped their gazes.

“I did,” Fury acknowledged. “But when he didn’t show up later – well, I had to wonder. I didn’t think he’d stay underground.” He shook his head. “It seems I misjudged him. You tell me, Captain – do you believe him when he says he’s cured extremis?”

“You don’t have to ask me, Director. He said it would be finished in a couple hours.”

“We’re already seeing signs that something’s changed,” Bruce put in, calling up a display on the table’s surface and sliding it over to Steve. The mess of data didn’t make much sense to him – this was obviously something out of Bruce’s personal notes, all numbers rather than the graphs and visuals that Steve was used to receiving – but he nodded anyway, because he trusted Bruce’s judgment. “A lack of movement... I think it’s killing the people already infected.”

Steve swallowed. Tony hadn’t mentioned that part – except, in all their shouted words of death tolls... Steve had said six million; Tony said twenty. Damn it. He should have picked up on that. “I think they were already dead.”

“The Chinese are going nuts – zombies acting weird does _not_ make them happy.” Clint lounged against the top of one of the conference room chairs. “If you don’t call it soon, sir, they’re gonna panic.”

“Well, Captain?” Fury pinned Steve with his stare. “Can Stark be trusted?”

“Yes, he can,” Steve said firmly, not letting himself waver an inch – if it came down to staring contests, the serum was going to give him an edge. He was exhausted, but they’d fed and watered him on the flight out to the Helicarrier; he could take this fight. But... honesty forced him to add, “With this, at least.”

That got him a disbelieving stare from Bruce, and a quiet snort from Clint. Fury held Steve’s gaze for a few seconds longer, and then, with a demeanour that specified that he was in _no_ way conceding the staring contest, turned to Clint. “Barton, go help Hill calm the Chinese down. Feel free to spread it around that it’s a cure, but SHIELD needs to keep where it came from locked down.”

“Sir, you know that’s a losing proposition. The entire ‘carrier knows.”

“Just get it done, Agent.”

Clint didn’t roll his eyes, but he did sketch a damn lazy salute before he pushed off of his chair and left.

“You say Tony can be trusted with this,” Bruce said slowly. He was hunched in on himself, in a way designed to avoid attention, to be just one more tired face among the crowds – never-mind that there was only the three of them here. “You mean he can’t be trusted with other things.”

“He wants revenge against the guy who invaded last year,” Steve said, and then he had to pause to correct that. “...sort of. That person’s real identity is complicated. But Tony’s ultimate goal is to keep the same thing he witnessed from happening to other worlds, including the entirety of ours. He’s... kinda single-minded about it.”

“This is about the New York invasion?” Fury leaned forward.

Steve took a breath. “Yes and no. Mostly no. I’m getting out of order in telling this. I oughtta start at the beginning, but I have to say first – sir, Tony is not crazy. Anymore. There were outside influences acting on him before, affecting his judgment, and those are gone. He can be a very valuable asset to this world, and I really do think that his threat assessment of the alien is accurate. He should be allowed to help deal with it. But he needs _support_ – people to keep him grounded.”

“That’s going to depend a lot on him,” Fury told him.

Well, that was true. Steve hoped Tony would be at least a little cooperative; the president might be a Captain America fan, but even Steve’s cachet – as ridiculous as he usually thought it was – only went so far. And Tony... Tony had a lot to make up for.

“I’m aware of that, sir. But a lot of this shouldn’t be said aloud.” He tossed the notepad he’d borrowed on the table. The flight out to intercept the Helicarrier – currently heading at full speed back to the US –had been almost ninety minutes; he’d done his best to make them count. “I took the liberty of writing you a briefing.”

 

 

 

Time: 04:17:51 EST  
Estimated Patch saturation: 99.9943%

“Stark,” said Fury, pulling the heavy steel chair back and dropping into it. Tony concealed a wince at the sight. Fury had to be wearing body armour to be able to do that – these chairs were really damn uncomfortable, and Tony could now say with almost complete certainty that he was the only cyborg in the room. At least, he wasn’t getting any signals off of Fury.

That room was aboard the Raft, which he was pretty sure Fury had chosen only half because Stark Industries hadn’t been anywhere near the contracting for it, unlike every other SHIELD base-slash-prison that Tony knew of. Granted, until a few hours ago he hadn’t known about the _Raft_ , either. And that was impressive – because a holding facility of this size, stuck on the ocean floor... relatively shallow water or not, well. Hiding it was impressive. Hiding it from _him_ – how had Fury managed it, when he hadn’t even known it was necessary?

How much had Steve told SHIELD?

Internal monitors picked up an increase in heart-rate; he ignored it ruthlessly. If extremis hadn’t still been undergoing the rewrite from the patch, he’d have shoved such tells off onto a separate server and firewalled it away from any possibility of emotional compromise. Hell. Maybe he had that backward...

 _Pride goeth, Tony_ , said Steve in the back of his head, except that it wasn’t actually Steve, or even a hallucination of Steve. It was just the sound of his pride tumbling off a cliff.

_Every time I think I’ve hit rock bottom..._

No time to dwell on that. Not with Fury leaning forward like the wrath of a one-eyed god. Had Odin ever worn a coat as badass as that? In some strange world, probably. It took Tony off-balance, then, when Fury didn’t _sound_ mad; he sounded a little bit resigned - this was a tone Tony had grown used to hearing before he’d entered college – a little bit cheesed off, with quite a lot of mild calculation – really, the intricacies of what Nick Fury decided to show _anybody_ , and _why_ , would need a computer way more advanced than a Stark-brain on extremis to sort out.

So complex, really, that Tony almost missed the question.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Right now? Freezing to death,” Tony answered promptly. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing here.” They _had_ stripped him naked, as soon as he was separated from Steve – so they weren’t complete idiots, although it didn’t seem like they’d figured out _what_ his clothes were, yet – and though they’d given him new clothes, orange ones, they were _just_ thin enough to be uncomfortable with the Raft’s air conditioning.

Still, SHIELD had treated him in a surprisingly civilized fashion. They’d even let him shower once they were done searching him. It was probably more than he deserved.

19 641 2??

He nudged the counter into inactive mode.  It wasn’t something he needed to be thinking about, not if he wanted to pull this off. And he had to – he couldn’t stay here too long. Not with Loki out there.

Not with most of his brain tangled up in the ongoing extremis rewrite. If he’d had access, he could have stolen processing power from satellites and external servers, but those were out of reach in this shielded, underwater room; he still wasn’t sure if Fury realized exactly how crippling that was, but he had to know to some extent. With the loss of his clothes had gone the bulk of his armour nanites, too. The longer he was separated from it, the more reintegration was going to be a bitch all over again.

But it was a relief, too. Because if they were doing all this – but they hadn’t used – then Steve hadn’t –

With a wrench, Tony tore his thoughts away, thinking longingly of the _stop_ command. He couldn’t use it right now, he reminded himself. Not during the rewrite, not when it was already prone to causing errors. He _couldn’t_.

_Jesus Christ, come on, I shouldn’t need it just to deal._

“Really? That’s what you’re going with?” Fury arched both eyebrows. It made the eye-patch wiggle a bit.

“What? In the short term, sure. In the long term – alien abduction? Forced captivity, forced to make a new kind of weapons and test them on myself? I could plead insanity and get it, don’t you think?”

Fury didn’t look impressed. “Believe it or not, Stark, I am actually on your side, here. If you could stop trying to self-immolate along with all those burnt bridges, you might even realize that.”

“I know you are.” His fingers were about to start twitching nervously – he forced himself to stop, and to _keep on_ stopping, without writing any patches. Just until he could, again. Just until then. “But you did a shitty job of it, Nick. What do you want me to say?”

That was the problem with messages meant to be received after death – they were too tempting an opportunity to reveal _far_ too much. If he _had_ managed to defy Steve, defy Tripitaka...

_ st – FUCK.  _

“I think you could start with giving me something that would at least agree with what Captain Rogers’ has said in the past, given how much he’s _not_ said.” Fury spread his hands, tilted the heavy steel chair back – somehow managing to make it look effortless despite how heavy the thing had to be.

Tony bared his teeth at him. “Gimme my phone call, and then we’ll talk.”

How far would Fury go to try to keep him here? Trapped under the water –

Not that Fury needed to, not when Steve had –

Fury stared at him for a long moment – or at least it _felt_ long beneath that gimlet eye. Maybe it was all of one second; extremis’ clock could say whatever the hell it wanted on the matter, but Tony didn’t care. It didn’t last _forever_ , which was the important point: Fury climbed to his feet, somehow seeming weary in the doing of it – an affectation, only – and gave him another glare when he was done with that small action. “When you’ve realized you can do more with your mind _and_ body free, let me know, Stark.”

Didn’t matter. He needed the time to have the populace forget; to have the cure run its course; to have credit weighed in his favour. Five thousand things behind the scenes to take care of, and he needed to show that he wouldn’t just walk out of here; people needed to _trust their government_ and wasn’t that a fucking _joke –_

_stop_

Error: Operation denied for duration of patch application.

_...I wish I hadn’t coded that._

Fury headed for the door. He didn’t bother with a quippy last line – though, Jesus, the way that coat billowed was quippy enough, Tony had _never_ been able to pull off that type of power-walk – except that maybe he could, now, with his four extra inches. Stupid vanities – and extra reach in a fight; an extra edge over the public; people looked up to people they looked up to. People were idiots.

_ Takes one to know one. _

The guard outside pulled the door closed, and it swung shut with an impressively final _thoom._


	12. Epilogue / Teaser

The guard outside pulled the door closed, and as it swung around it revealed Loki standing there – horned antlers and all.

_ overclock 0.1 s _

His thoughts sped up – literally, processors coming online and taking apart information faster than they had any right to, processing the emotional flood and tamping it down – not half as pretty as his nice neat _stop_ command, because he still felt it, like time had stood still just to let him feel it and pack it back away, without showing a damn thing on his face, because he would _not_ show weakness. Not here. Not to _him_ , ever.

His processing turnover whirled back down, back into a rate that wouldn’t actively damage his brain, and he didn’t jump as the door met its frame with an impressively final _thoom._

 “Son of a bitch,” said Tony conversationally.

“No, my mother was bipedal when she begat me,” said Loki, stepping forward with a smirk, raking his eyes over Tony’s orange jumpsuit. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

“What, seriously? _That’s_ what you open with? You’d think somebody called ‘Loki Silvertongue’ could do better than a total cliché.”

“Mm, but it has the simple ring of truth, and as much as you may call me a liar, Stark, I have to admit... a simple truth in the right place can cause the most exquisite chaos.” He closed his eyes, inhaling as if he could savour the scent of it, looking like – well.

Tony coughed and politely looked away. “So, what ‘simple truth’ have you come to impart, that you think’ll make me fly off the handle and do something stupid?” he asked, doing his best to sound bored. Which was kinda difficult in the face of the homicidal rage and desperate helplessness. It didn’t particularly matter that he didn’t have the armour here – although, _damn_ the fact he didn’t: a few more days, and he’d have the subspacing refined to a point where he’d never be without the armour again. Yet even if he’d had it, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. _If_ Loki was here in person, and not just an illusion – which Tony doubted – _killing_ him here still wouldn’t matter. This wasn’t _him;_ this was just a sliver of him, the smallest fraction.

“That you should worship me, Tony,” Loki said, moving with a swiftness akin to Steve’s until he was _right_ behind Tony, and Jesus Fucking Christ _stop_

Error: Operation denied for duration of patch application.

_ OVERRIDE, DAMN IT! _

\- he did not jump out of his skin.

“Or as much as you _could_ worship, having no soul,” Loki continued, sounding amused. “But is it not meet that in the final days of the world, even the soulless might beg for salvation?”

“I might beg you to shut up,” said Tony. “But I’d rather _enforce_ that. Permanently.”

“So hostile,” Loki murmured, and at a more human speed moved around to the other side of the table, taking Fury’s seat. “This is not the time for hostility between us, Tony – Thanos threatens this multiverse, this _cluster_ as you so call it – and he is an experienced hand at war. This Yggdrasil would not be the first that he has burned to ash.”

“Great, once I kill _you_ maybe you can compare notes with him on how it’s worked out for you both. Your info’s a little out of date. The Living Tribunal finally got off its ass and ganked that guy – what, half a day ago? Time’s relative.”

“I would commend you on fitting so many falsehoods into so few words, except that you actually _believe_ them all,” drawled Loki, and how _did_ he manage to drawl like a smug Southerner while sounding like a Brit? It boggled Tony’s puny little mortal mind. But then the smugness vanished, leaving behind nothing but business.

But damn, he looked sincere.

“Spit it out,” Tony told him.

“The Living Tribunal lost,” said Loki. “Oh, it set back Thanos some – but even now, the Mad Titan gathers his strength once more.” His voice dropped to barely above a murmur. “But look ye, gods and mortals, to the saviour of the Nine Realms; with my help, Anthony Stark, this multiverse is not yet doomed.”

Sure. And he’d come... here.

“You mean _you_ need _my_ help,” blurted Tony.

Loki bared his teeth in something that might be described as a grin, if the person doing the describing was the god of lies.  

“Truth,” the aforementioned deity purred.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed, but if you've got criticism you'd like to share, please don't be shy. If you'd like to contact me privately you can send me [tumblr ask](http://teykekeyte.tumblr.com/ask), or I have auto-screening and anon-commenting enabled on [this post on my LJ](http://teyke.livejournal.com/312.html). Time-travel is tricky (and so was formatting this fic, ugh) so I really would be extremely grateful to anyone who'd like to point out what didn't (or did) work for them.


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